ethics

Prologues.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

(Because this is me, there is another prologue before this section).

Where to start, in terms of family life and culture? Or maybe specifically music? And how to know when awarenesses became so developed, or grief, shock or hormones took over so completely that the whole of my life became about defiance. Because I think maybe it did. And this feeds in to everything.

Defy the shock of people dying. Then before you know it defy the evil that was Thatcher. Wade in there. Defy the bigotry and prejudice criminally at large and *in some way* oppose the privilege. All this in a teen rage. Then live up to those who came before, whilst knowing they were different – maybe simpler, better – and that things don’t or can’t work like that. But let them still be your gods.

Don’t fer Christ’s sake out yourself as such – faaar too pretentious, far too self-righteous! – but absolutely be a protest singer. Be the inevitable mad mixture that you feel; of hard, deep thinker and honest force. Be immune to judgements from outside; be fearless and pour the good energy in. Time will or may come when you can be more accepting. For now, trust and work and be conscious. These things have value.

                                                                     *

The moment is everything: accident-of-birth catapulting me simultaneously into a hormone-fest and Anarchy in the UK meant this particular youth was inevitably a Child of That Time. Driven or pumped. Scarred, maybe. Furious, definitely; judgmental definitely. Carrying a load, probably.[1] Deeply lost but as deeply certain as most teens – yes? – that he would do things in enflamed opposition to the pitiful acquiescence that was Normal Life. So yeh, off-the-scale indulgent in some respects but also having a kind of rebellious integrity.

People died on us and I‘m not going to tell their stories here. There’s enough of that in the previous books. You just need to register the possibility that maybe everything Yours F Truly does is a kind of amorphous, inadequate, politicised homage to three great ‘ordinary’ blokes. This is not to say that I am a hugely party-political animal, or that I under-appreciate the Walton Women: but it rightly implies that I’m on a permanent slow-burn around how the world just ain’t good enough, in a way that those better men simply weren’t.

There’s generational stuff in play here, because a) life was simpler and b) in some senses it was less aware. Folks just didn’t know or couldn’t know the world, its peoples and its foibles in the way we can now. (Not that this makes us any more educated). Plus sentiment. I may gush, or goddammit not be able to see[2], or drown us in the kind of emotive slippage we’re all prone to. This is what love does: this is what age does.

I may never know if these old guys were just wiser, apparently swerving the day-to-day cataclysms that eat away at me/you/us, but however dubiously old-school it may sound, here’s my daft Braveheart moment: *raises fist*.

I am proud to be of them. Always, I will love, revere and follow them, or try to, for their invincible (yes) and endless (yes it was!) honesty and humility. They are recalled in the hope that we can all, in the modern idiom, stand on their elephantine shoulders.

                                                                     *

I guess the thing that stirs me the most is the urgent need to change the universe. And that really may be a direct result of punk and Margaret Thatcher.

Bit loathe to put dates into this baby but it may be inescapable. Absolutely not telling you freeloaders my birth date – not until we’re mates and you’ve proved you’re worth it – but suppose I can offer the rough figuration that I was a furious and pyrotechnically hormonal late-teen when the over-combed one began to preen through and over our lives. She, and Rotten’s voice, and Strummer’s heart, and Costello’s lyrics and my father’s death were the things that made me. They were contingent and co-forming energies that powered and power me towards trying, at the very least, to live a life that opposes.

This book, the third part (so far) in my #lolsobiography, is inevitably about that. But it’s also about sport, about influence, about how wonderful things are, even when darkness and dumbness and the twisted evils of money and privilege continue to pin us to the deck. My faith in art and music and sport never dims. My faith in the Three Great Mates we all have and need and my two sensational kids carries me through. 

                                                                       *

Life seems to have conspired towards poles of opinion, not just on social media but that might be the most obvious example. Too many of us make judgements that are ill thought-out or unforgiving. We’re bawling our truths at each other. We exercise (or exorcise?) a kind of manic certainty that draws us into conflict rather than conversation. Everything from the Twitters[3] to PMQs contributes to this.

Let me put on record my own weakness in this regard: I get angry and I judge. But in my heart I know that tolerance – and knowing that you may be wrong – are essential human virtues. We do have to judge; we do have to decide; we do need to get better but we also need to be civil. That’s not a recipe for capitulation.

*Takes further deep breath*. Look I’m as ready as the next bloke to launch into Grandstanding Mode. The Times and the Socials and everything about now make GM the engaged individual’s ‘natural’ response, do they not? Us punters are being teased towards some angry vortex all the time. Ah: cue some polar expeditionism.

We live, it strikes me, in an extraordinary and dangerous moment. The West is arguably madder than it’s ever been, with the Trump/Musk coalition-thing a catastrophic threat to the intelligence, knowledge and goodness that underpins society itself. (It’s November 2024 as I write: we await the second Trump term but Brother Elon has sculpted the matrix into an angry monster). The truth has suffered an especially foul Special Op’[4] – Bannon’s infamous shitstorm. Those previously relatively harmless Influencers (think makeovers, think pranksters, posers and dancers) have morphed into combat-ready sub-nazis.

This is a challenge. It can drag us down and have us raging at (and waaay beyond) the deliberately-reduced politics we now suffer in the West.

So don’t expect me to qualify everything – I may fall short! I know we’re well-advised to avoid cheap blame-games but I’m still gonna launch, here and there. Of course under-privileged and under-educated people have always been likely to ‘strike out’. Of course this general discontent has always been weaponized by people with hands on the levers. But there are lines we just don’t cross; there are things which are just plain wrong.

The Great Families and the oligarchs; the MAGA cult and the ‘gammon’; the liars and the cheats and the racists are bad folks.[5] Some more, some less. We who feel this may be entitled to tell them that, although this is likely to be inflammatory. ‘We see you’. But we also have to deal with them – by that, I mean debate, include, educate – however difficult or unlikely that may seem. And, perhaps before we inter-react, or rise to condemn, or commit the sin of prejudice ourselves, we have to go big and go public on the idea that they, these people, are as valuable as we are. They have our right to argue.

It may not get much tougher than to accept that the ‘racist morons’ or ‘easily-led’ on our streets or in our timelines are people we have to appreciate but… we do. Whilst opposing them.

Where lies progress in all this? On a political level I suppose we need to elect governments that will be a) strong enough morally to oppose prejudice and b) smart enough economically to improve the lot of the disaffected. Clearly, sadly, the momentum appears to be going the other way in certain key democracies.

This brings us back into the circle of action, or exasperation. There is a kind of backstop, a point of no further retreat for many of us. Prejudice and privilege are wrong. Whether entitled or powerless, ignorant or driven, player or played, they are wrong. We can and should choose to do better around those things – we surely have to? This implies all kinds of stuff but let’s just call it goodness. Most of us recognize it, even if we choose not to ‘walk in its path’. There are a million distractions, some gorgeous, some filthy. We need to be decent and fair and friendly; to find the invincibly moral core. That can be common; can define us.

But hang on. In the face of Trumpism and Reform, alt-rightism and this galaxy of loss, what’s our civil/intellectual/physical/cultural reaction? Depends who we are. Are we leaders or passengers or artists or victims? Who do we look to, where do we go? Weirdly, it seems a scientific certainty that there will be a response, even in this turbulent evil. (Is that not how the universe works?) The response may even be a thing of glory and inspiration.

Wonderfully, we make our statements in a myriad of ways. As the mighty Slits did, we can ‘create’; kick up a fuss; make something challenging and radical and beautiful. We may need to do more, but this is part of the change – or at least one irrepressibly human, principal means to strike back. Let’s create. Let’s be anti-badness; anti-racist; anti- any declining status quo. Our pens are ‘snug as a gun’.[6] Our fingers are on the fretboard. This is part of life’s purpose.

[1] Went to see some weirdo, many years later, after a heart episode. He looked at me and immediately asked why I was carrying the world’s troubles. ‘I’m seeing a yolk across your shoulders’.

[2] Yup. Definitely prone to welling-up.

[3] Yeh I know, now X. Pipe down!!

[4] Deliberate perversion of things we thought were fixed and factual. Facilitated by socials/moguls/what we might call the Extremist Establishment.

[5] Read on before you judge…

[6] Slits: ‘Typical Girls’, from ‘Cut’. Seamus Heaney: ‘Digging’.

If Not Now Then When?

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The more I’ve thought about the particularly rich and what we might now call developmental periods of my life the more obvious it’s become that anger and conscience sparked via music have come to guide or define who I am.

Music can describe, reflect, light up or emphatically nobble us. (Confession: I’m crocked). Very often it does capture the times themselves – the times in which we grew. Of course relating said theory to punk or new wave may seem thin to those who weren’t there or those who just don’t get shifted by choons in the way some of us have been. But surely you get this? Surely you have your own tonal moments, or words etched over your heart? Songs that just carry you, whatever the era?

Welcome to the club. Whilst I will maintain that ’76-82 was massive, not just for my gang of mates but in terms of influencing zillions of lives, I am clear your own vibe is just as valid. Tell me all about it: maybe later?

We’re bound to hype-up the things around us when our hormones are hyper-active. Things are or were more highly-coloured when we’re young. That perspective is always gonna out-biff real perspective and I’m fine with that. ‘Our music’, the stuff we got off on or got furious to in our teens and early twenties, is always gonna be the best. For me this was punk and post-punk. Yes I can take a philosophic in-breath before conceding that it’s not the Only Time. But it felt that way. Maybe until now.

Clearly and for obvious reasons, everybody holds tight to the music of their teens. I get that. It’s just natural. It’s gonna feel special. But try to get a fix on 1976/7/8/9. It feels like the streets are on fire and sometimes they are. There are Thatcherian (was that ever even a word?) or what we might nowadays term Trumpian levels of divisiveness and even hatred in the political ether. There’s Jonny Rotten and Joe Strummer and Paul Weller… and that sound.

(In my humble view) the late Seventies is the greatest time in the history of popular music. For the energy and the intent, however flawed, or obscured by inadequate explication, however feebly understood by the pogoing masses. Something was really happening. Throw in being a tumultuously hormonal young fella with a powerful sense that things aren’t right or fair, plus shock and existential confusion over a family tragedy or two. Why wouldn’t you attach, pretty directly and permanently, to the soundtrack of these life-changing moments?    

But why was it so brilliant? I’m thinking because here in Blighty it kinda had to be.

The Punk Experience was all about immediacy, urgency, spittle; about kinds of revolution in the now, because of the now. In our case that meant Thatcher, injustice and anger. The North-South divide. Racism. Homophobia – later enshrined in the law in the infamous Section 28 – but a part of the Thatcherite vocab well before HIV struck in 1981. Shameless boom for some, bust for many. We can be entirely specific that Thatcherism was a signal factor in the emergence of a furious counter-culture. Trump and Musk are surely worse by every metric?

What does this mean, if anything? A) I find it fabulous, rich territory, this whole idea that powerful responses to circumstance, through art – i.e. music – can be such huge, formative participants in our lives. B) That implies (or makes un-deniable) the notion that both individuals and cultures – political, structural – can be changed by noises, by ideas. Throw in the demystification and opening-up that was essential to punk and we may have grounds for optimism that a Second Coming (for widespread, meaningful dynamic protest music) really may be a natural outcome, *here and now*.  

                                                               *                         

Chewing this over with a mate and he offers the thought that maybe Mozart was punk: he certainly set out to provoke The Toffs. My understanding is that the great man had a love-hate relationship with his audience and that the work, beautiful and godlike though it might be, was on occasion(s) specifically driven by conscience and by anger. He was also something of a rebel entrepreneur, hosting his own gigs to make those socio-political statements. (Malcolm McLaren, eat shit!) Point taken.

Spinning forwards, it seems obvious that popular music was intrinsic to the cause and the life of the Civil Rights campaigns of the US. (I recently watched some extraordinary footage of Nina Simone at her fierce, magnificent best. It was a revelation. More on this momentarily). Blues itself may be a resistance movement that dwarfs punk in scale and richness. Some would argue that the folk scene of the Sixties was as hearty and conscious as any period.

Zooming out geographically, of course there are spectacular and seminal indigenous protest songs from the Arab Spring and from Latin-American bands raging about murder, corruption or drugs, or the stuff that felt relevant and possibly *most obscene* to them. Go find them.

Anger is an energy. I found the ‘Rolling Stone 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time’, late-on in the writing of my next book. Found it interesting… and a challenge. Not that I’m entirely shifting from my advocacy for punk – no, sir. But a(n admittedly imperfect) ‘world perspective’, over a century of angry music? Well why wouldn’t that be a challenge?

Nina Simone’s ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ is in there at number 7. (But hang on. I bet you wanna know who tops it? Sam Cooke; ‘A Change Is Gonna Come, from ’64). Back to Nina.

She pronounced herself ‘skeptical’ of protest music out of concern that it can over-simplify and therefore reduce moments of reckoning and complexity. This was before the murder of four black children in the infamous Alabama church bombing and the assassination of activist Medgar Evers, both in 1963. I imagine she just got so mad she flew into the writing of one of the most poignant and potent songs of any time. ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ first appeared on a live album and guess what? It was banned for a time, in some southern states.

Simone also covered the Billie Holliday classic ‘Strange Fruit’ and in ‘Backlash Blues’ and ‘I Wish I Knew What It Was To Be Free’ she railed brilliantly and with passion against the patent, rancid injustice of the time.

Can’t wait any longer. Who now, in the time of Musk and Trump, will carry that torch? This feels like a moment not just for Angels of Protest but for massive, concerted resistance – yes, perhaps led by artists and musicians. The wildness and vileness of the whole MAGA Project makes the bigotry and divisiveness of Thatcherism feel almost petty. I don’t normally do perspective but despite piling up a lifetime of anger and revulsion around that woman and despite being a giant pond’s distance away the pall over America feels scarily more foul than late Seventies UK.

My book is about my life and the impact upon it of contemporary rackets. I depart to major on Nina Simone for several reasons. She was radical – she told Martin Luther-King she could not be non-violent. She had a real, sensational power and talked of having no choice but to respond to the evil of the time. Simone’s voice and piano are rare, rare things. And she has produced some of the greatest music that’s ever graced this planet.

                                                                *

In that ‘100 Best’ we find Woody Guthrie – more than once, from memory – but at no. 11 with ‘This Land Is Your Land’. We find a reminder that Tracy Chapman’s smooth-but-eloquent ‘Fast Cars’ is deliciously spiky. We remember (maybe with mixed feelings?) one of the superstar protests, in ‘Sun City, by Artists Against Apartheid. We get a nudge towards checking out Beyoncé at the Superbowl – 2016, she’s done more than one! – with her black sisters wearing deliberately provocative Black Power military-chic, performing ‘Freedom’ and thereby making a HUGE POLITICAL STATEMENT IN FRONT OF HALF THE WORLD.

Closer to (my) home there is one of the most upful protest songs ever committed to vinyl – Specials AKA ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ from 1984. I played it to a theatre group in the hotel bar I was running in West Wales. Resident and rehearsing at our place, they insisted on hearing it at the end of every working day, to fire them up whilst bashing out their own inspiring art.

Number 2 on that Rolling Stone chart is ‘Fight The Power’ from Public Enemy, a raw and in-your-face revisitation to the Isley Brothers’ record of 1975. Recorded for Spike Lee’s movie ‘Do The Right Thing’, it may owe its high position in that chart to the exposure around that, as well as its punk-rap brazenness and defiance. It’s noteworthy (and I take no issue with this *whatsoever*) that all five of the chart-toppers are by people of colour protesting injustice. Suggesting again how vital a force music can be in offering an outlet, a voice that can really register.

Bob Dylan was at no. 6 with ‘Masters of War’. Interestingly – or not – the descriptive blurb alongside makes a link between folk and punk; a reminder of that profound tradition for conscious stories which is so characteristic of folk music… and, yaknow, folk like us.

Remember Helen Reddy? Me too, just about. She may be offended by the label ‘Australian soft-rocker’ but consoled by the knowledge that her ‘I am Woman’ of 1971 became a feminist icon that bounced down the years. (It’s at 73 in the chart). It kinda bounced into my lap because – I’m pret-ty certain I have this right – the England and Wales Cricket Board used the 2013 Katy Perry song ‘Roar’, which uses Reddy’s refrain, to back some All Stars promo stuff I played in schools. (I was, some of you will know, a Community Cricket Coach for many years. Am now just a Pathway Cricket Coach). In this way, Reddy’s rally may still be roaring.

The Top 100 of anything is usually reductive garbage; we know this. I take significant umbrage with the fact that ‘Guns of Brixton’ – one of The Clash’s worst songs – is in the Rolling Stone collection, at no. 56. Cobblers. Especially when I’m seeing nothing of Elvis Costello! Not going to go scouring the whole thing again but not seeing ‘Ghost Town’ (but X-ray Spex are in there) and no ‘Eton Rifles’ but ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ gets the nod. Ah well; subjectivity, eh?

                                                               *

Punk-influenced music was and is massive in the lives of many of us. It was populist, in theory and in practice, in a good way. Perhaps most satisfyingly, the advent of Independent Record Labels, or more exactly their proliferation, based and inspired around new wave music, was central to making the movement – and that whole ethos around DIY – work.

Real People could make records. To some extent the capitalist universe was successfully bypassed. Yes the treadmill was still grinding and bands were still (diabolically in my view) talking about ‘cracking America’, but the Problem of Scale – i.e. specifically aiming to make records that would be played across American radio – was suddenly drenched in righteous spittle. Tiddly, ‘cottage-industry’ Independent Labels were pumping out real and relevant music, close to home. That was important. No: it was fucking maaarvellous.

Or’nary Herberts could get up and do stuff. Me; you; Fergal Sharkey; Mark E Smith. They could record it, too, and access to new technologies would only increase, thereby (theoretically at least) multiplying the opportunities. New and often more personal or political messages could be sent out from voices previously unheard. This was the Great Demystification. The offering. You no longer had to be ‘musical’, or ambitious, or on a contract with a major. You could go from your bedroom, thrashing three angry chords, to a local boozer or small independent venue. Fair enough, this must have led to some bad art. But it gave us the 101ers and The Jam.

Values were re-set; the power of honest, simple art was re-stated; truth stood in the doorway; everybody was welcomed in.                                                    

There were a million fakers, from Billy Idol to New Romantics down the line but something did change. The mighty and sensational music produced late seventies/early eighties – Joy Division/Echo and the Bunnymen/Talking Heads and the soon come Two Tone era -could not have happened without the spark, the release, the (yes!) moral judgment and the idealism of punk. To be credible, you had to write about something. Cut the frills and the solos. Tell us what fires you up… or at least stop seeking adoration. Tell us a meaningful story. Tell us something that matters. Maybe get angry with the government.

Karl Ove and me.

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The boy Knaussgaard definitely dun gud.

Have battered my way through the first two volumes of ‘My Struggle’, where he shreds and re-builds most concepts of art, truth, the human condition and that which is sayable. The word ‘compelling’ appears on both sleeves: it’s a word that might sound bland. Not here. I read these bad boys in a couple of days flat; almost impossible not to.

‘A Death in the Family’ and ‘A Man in Love’ are MASSIVE LITERATURE in the (classic?) sense of having tremendous envisioning scope, and also in terms of being unequivocally serious art. The clues are in the names – most obviously in ‘My Struggle’, which is of course a deliberately epic-sounding moniker designed to bounce through the generations. This is art with ambition (as well as scary North European normalcy), aimed at the peak, at the heart, at the authentically high and thoughtful but delivered via the contemporary and the everyday. As I say, I’ve devoured both tomes.

Now like every other schmuck doodler, and despite just diving in and never over-thinking, I’ve latched onto coupla things. Notably the fearlessness and the voice.

Knaussgaard is relentless and ruthless around honesty. This is his voice and we are compelled to believe it, for the execution, for sure – for its brilliance – but also the amorphous power, the urgency across the text. Something in the vividness and energy of the storytelling (is that what it is?) completely captures us.

His often challenging but crystalline worldview(s) will out, if you will, because he commits utterly and directly: meaning the kind of autobiography that smacks you in the face because of its combination of insight and what we might call observational truth. The fella is, as Geir remarks, an ascetic. He makes a brutally real record of things but also, critically reveals the soul – in the landscape, of the people. This is some achievement.

I have read nothing about Knaussgaard, deliberately, so far. I imagine his saying of the unsayable, for example, around caesarian births and the general liberalisation/’feminisation’ of cultures and the contempt in which he holds the Swedish worthie-intelligentsia fashionista-crew draws a heavy dollop of flak.

Maybe it’s too blokey – reactionary, even? I’m watching this… but currently in the These Are Important Issues We Must Be Able to Talk About camp. Plus he is of course right about the smugness of some of us liberals. And Knaussgaard is *at least* as excoriatingly critical of himself as of anybody else. The books are alive with opinion but too wise, I think, to document arrogance or certainty. He is observing meticulously and with vigour so as to find truth: at whatever cost.

On pages 496/7 of ‘A Man in Love’ the (ahem) *wild, hard-drinking Norwegian* writes about writing itself.

(*Absolutely in as a wind-up!* Wonder if the magazine interviews he so detests have ever described him that way?!? Anyway, onwards)…

I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up.

… the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words it was the same.

Knaussgaard goes on to say that he hated this sameness with ‘every fibre of his being’, because it had ‘no value’. I take this to mean that he felt it an inadequacy, a distraction, a betrayal, because art should or can offer more than this. (And Knaussgaard is unmistakably a serious artist).

I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work… Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value.

Value lies in ‘diaries and essays… (which) just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a gaze you could meet’.

He is talking about the direct way into truth that autobiography can proffer.

Now I am not a great writer – unlike my Norwegian brother, here. And I really don’t overthink these things: I just do. However forgive me if I did feel just a teeny bit vindicated by this argument for honesty-through-voice.

By accident this is how I’ve practised my own prattling for aeons. For always. Falling back on personal experience – the things I know and care about – because that way I might find some truth. Because I would know it was honest.

That’s as close as I get or as deep as I get into thinking about what I can or should write. Bottom line, do I know it? Can I be true? If so, all else is superfluous. Number of readers, quality of reaction, fear of judgement, all an irrelevance. I can absolutely park that suspicion that I may be a nobody and a laughing-stock as long as the voice in there feels authentically like mine. I can have some hope that things on the page, feeling genuine, can resonate, can have value.

Might sound ridiculous. To hear me paralleling-along with a properly magnificent tome (or six). But I have no delusions of grandeur, here. Neither does Karl Ove, although he plainly does have Literary Ambition. It’s just gratifying (is that too much?) to find that we share the wee recognition that maybe there IS something good about writing what you really know… in your own voice.

Postscript: in a not unrelated burst of wild confidence, Yours F Truly has landed on the notion that my vicarious upgrade via the Knaussgaard voice-authentification-assessment means I am well within my rights to claim that the Dots Will Not Be Joined/Beautiful Games constitutes a new art form, which I am happy to christen lolsobiography. I trust no explanation is necessary? The third volume in the series (of however many) is underway.

You have been warned.

The ground is shifting.

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Life’s busy, eh? Sometimes so busy that the MASSIVE ISSUES that sprung up either through SENSATIONAL BOOKS or profound, deep conversations have just wafted around in the ether like smoke – or like smoke that teases, or threatens to draw you in – rather than being ‘addressed’. (Whatever that means). I kinda like that life can be chock-full of undeniably seminal stuff that somehow contrives to drop down low, low in the list of priorities because the allegedly everyday swamps it. That’s both appalling and charming somehow, right? Can’t sort out the meaning of such-and-such, despite it’s marvellous heft because the bed-linen needs sorting, or the ailing dog just may need checking on, or the team for Sunday needs bunging up on the Whatsapp. Hang on: what about the revelatory import of that, or the mind-boggling measure of this?

I need to be specific but that may also undermine the very abstract (or abstracted?) nature of the mad-wonderness of what goes on. Let’s start with a book, briefly.

Top Raging Intellect and buddy of mine points me at ‘A Death in the Family’, Knaussgaard. My own family baggage may be in play but wow what a blast (of something, of everything) that was! Traumatically compelling but also deeply fortifying; probably on account of the undeniable brilliance *of the writing*, (whatever that means). Dark and deeeep and relentless but also pulling us through, yes? To a place where we are enriched, despite being bloody and exhausted, probably having devoured the 400 pages in the minimum possible time-frame. Emerging to nearly think excoriatingly deeply about x or y, but then yaknow, the washing got in the way.

But great book: surely, truly a great book? May go at it again within a day or two; domestic shite permitting.

So there was that, impinging deeply and then not, and there was also sporty stuff – there always is.

Look we need to light a fire under the loony impostor that is X; we know that. But I’ve always maintained that the Twitters can be tremendously uplifting (and even civilising) because if you offer good energy and make intelligent choices then fabulous, interesting people reveal themselves to you. Amongst the absolute donkeys. That happened again.

Cycling. Tour then Vuelta. Immersed and also dipping in there. Love the wild scenery, the filmic drama, the bewildering strategising, the ridicu-effort. Almost yearn (if that’s a thing) for untramelled belief in the sport of it – the who won, the who dug impossibly deep and found something special. But the buts are big, yes?

I’m not close to this – meaning I’m not even a club-level rider – so *being sure* has been at issue. For years. Watching Roglic and Evenepoel and Pogacar and Vingegaard perform to a superhuman level and wondering. Being unable to trust it, despite a lifetime of loving and believing in sport – despite being culturally behind the power of spinning legs and bursting hearts. Godammit. Feel the effort, here. Can we not just ignore that doubt? Just pretend?

Nope. Not after reading ‘The Art of Cycling’ and exchanging tweets (I know, I know!!) with James Hibbard, author and philosopher and (oh), former elite-level cyclist.

*Inserts: the bloke’s prob’ly getting some zeds in CaliforNIAAY as I write. I’ve messaged him to see how comfortable he might be with being outed as an authority and Man of Ideas around this. Typically I’m blasting on regardless before hearing back*. (Later heard back. he’s cool with this).

Firstly I loved Jimmy Lad’s book. Strongly recommend to anybody with an interest in thinking, never mind cycling/philosophy/psychology/soulfulness/ethics and the other wee corners of humanity that the fella digs into. Secondly, the twittering.

Muskrat’s enclave is still a place where decent people can quietly revolt… by exchanging perdy decent ideas in an agreeable way. By discoursing. We did that and I learned. (For fairness and to avoid litigation – lols – let me say here that not all of the following arose from conversations with James. But some new knowledge certainly did: and some of the rest was extrapolated out, or results from Yours F Truly stretching his cranial wotsits or curiosity towards other sources). It’s been good… and challenging… and may not have unmuddied the waters entirely. But healthy. On.

James was a pro rider and on the US track cycling team, back in the days when (says he as if those days are over) use of EPO and/or similar was widespread. Hibbard, alongside Paul Kimmage went public with fears and truths that remain relevant – not just in theoretical/moral/ethical terms but in relation to how cycling actually is now. In short, JH is clear that recent performances by leading riders have been ‘physiologically impossible’ without doping. He is similarly clear, much to our mutual regret, that the culture of lying persists. Cycling is still not just unclean but brazen. Hibbard argues that because this has gone on for decades – anti-doping technology (or will to prosecute?) being so-o far behind the use and masking of performance enhancement – that the whole eco-system is damaged. Specifically, there is no way that young riders entering the elite arena can expect to remain clean and succeed. (Or vice-versa).

Having read ‘The Art of Cycling’, I am in no doubt that Hibbard is a good man: a student of philosophy; a Proper Athlete and a man of reason. His arguments are compelling – even when they run on towards solutions that he himself admits are challenging. There’s a danger when reducing BIG ARGUMENTS but he is on record as saying that because the generational culture of deceit has been so meretricious, so tawdry and so subversive of all sporting values, we may need to re-set, to get real. Whilst it may feel better and maybe more comforting to up the ante (yet again) on prevention, this is simply not gonna work. So maybe (yes, with a heavy heart) opt for what Hibbard calls an F1-style regulated environment, where doping is tolerated and monitored – in order to keep athletes safe.

Your distaste for this may be the same as mine was. But cop this:

I think the interesting part is just how to go about making sports as beautiful and culturally useful as possible for young athletes.

(This from a message, on the Twitters).

In other words, we are both power-of-sport lovers and romantics: not guys looking to capitulate around our defence of ‘purity’. Hibbard is reluctantly driven there because the reality is so poisoned and the remedies will be corrupted in the same old ways of old. The tradition for what us Brits call diabolical porkies runs too strong, is too resistant to our goddam decency.

Look. The Vuelta and the Tour de France are getting bigger in every sense. Stages are massive and arguably more painful – what with monumental distances and intermediate sprints etc etc. The window of possibility for clean sport is closing as the conspiracy gets deeper and darker and more relentlessly obdurate. We’re all already perverted. To move on, we may need to think the unthinkable – or just do it.

Hibbard again:

I think I weigh the harms like this: sport as an F1 like operation with an athlete and responsible medical staff is not ideal, but athletes/teams doing all of it in dangerous ways to avoid detection with poor psychological consequences for both PED users and clean riders is worse.

Finally, zoom out, because we’re not just talking about cycling here. Other sports have dopers. What about this idea that we the sentient universe *actually might* host a kind of enhanced games, where events are open to performance-enhanced athletes? (Blimey: another worrying lurch on the god-forbid-ometer, surely? Automatic recoil mode engaged). And yet, if medically overseen, is this not where we’re moving – or being shifted?

I’m just about the daftest sports-romantic I know. But I hear the arguments.