Unlocking the bookshop one morning in June, the door lodged against something. It was dark and hard to see, but I guessed it must be a package dropped through the letterbox. Pushing harder, but gently, I squeezed in and retrieved from the floor a book. An ‘uncorrected bound proof’, said the cover. A folk-horror novel, apparently. The blurb said that ‘Justine and Adam’ had moved from London to Hastings, ‘after personal trauma and professional failure’. I knew the feeling.

They had moved to ‘a fisherman’s cottage’ backing onto a cave, wherein lay a witch bottle. The blurb mentions Crowley, the ‘Great Beast’. And the book? Named after his residence on the Ridge, Netherwood. By Jake Arnott, an established thriller writer, whose ‘The Long Firm’ had been televised.

I put the book aside by the printer, and opened up, thinking to myself, this is one to review, seeing as it has a local angle. Life was busy, I forgot all about it.

RAMBLINGS OF A MADMAN

Some weeks later a dishevelled man came, nervously it seemed, to the counter. ‘Did you get my book? A friend said he’d drop it by for you. Netherwood?’

‘Oh, yes’, I said, ‘but I haven’t gotten around to reading it’

‘Don’t, please. Don’t!’, he said rather emphatically.

‘Why ever not?’

‘Just… please don’t. It’s cursed!’

‘Cursed? Cursed how?’, I said in a tone that he clearly interpreted as indicating I was unlikely to pay attention to such foolishness.

So, he hesitantly went further: ‘Three reviewers were found dead next to copies of the book…  it’s cursed, I say!’

And with that, he stumbled from the store.

Naturally, he was right to think I would see his tale as the ramblings of a madman, and shrug off the supposed deaths as at worst, coincidence and, more likely, imagined. I, of course, resolved to take a peek. Standing at the counter I began to read. Nice short chapters, snappy prose, building a growing spooky atmosphere. Early on, the protagonists begin to hear voices and crying sounds from beyond the padlocked door to the cave. And Adam has taken the witch bottle and, unbeknown to Justine, opened it. I was quite taken by the events unfolding, so closed up at five as usual but stayed in the now dark shop, at the back counter, and read on.

It was now late, I’d lost track of time. But was dragged back to reality by a chill air from the kitchen, and whisperings in the dark. The shop is not well insulated and people live upstairs, so I thought nothing of it…  at first. But when entering the kitchen to get a coffee, the chill increased and the noises got louder. The cold emanated from the dark space below the sink, on the back wall, behind which were the lower reaches of the castle hill. It occurred to me to wonder where the cottage in the story actually was. The geography was vague, but it felt to me as if it must be off the terrace backing onto the castle by Castle Hill Road. An entirely different chill gripped me. In a sudden and unexpected burst of superstition, I remembered the warning from the strange man – perhaps a gap had opened up into a smugglers network laced through the hill, connecting with the cottages of the terrace above? I tried to remind myself that Netherwood was only a work of fiction. But fear gripped me anyway. Petrifying fear, that grew and grew as the noises became darker and darker – indeed, occult, in character.

CURSES BE DAMNED

I left the shop hastily, and ran blindly through the precinct. I was almost as far as Primark, unconsciously heading for the station, when a hand gripped my shoulder from behind. I whirled around to face my assailant. It was the man who’d warned me off reading the book.

‘How far did you read? How far!?’, he shouted into my face.

‘About… about… halfway’, I gasped.

He sighed. ‘You may be OK, I’m not sure’, he said, ‘Here, take this!’ – he shoved a stone into my hand, a stone with a hole in it. ‘It’s a hagstone. To break Crowley’s curse. Leave, if you can, it may not be too late!’

‘Who are you? Who the hell are you?’, I cried.

‘The author, of course!’, he said, ‘Jake Arnott! Now go, for heaven’s sake!’

I turned and ran. But, passing the Sea Dog, tripped, the stone falling from my hand. It rolled, hit a drain, ‘tink… tink tink’ across the cold iron slats, and dropped into the abyss. The sky seemed to darken behind me, thunder rolled, voices – in my head? – grew louder… I turned, panicked. Jake was still standing down the slope. He looked ashen. ‘Too late,’ he said, ‘too late!’ and turned and ran.

I decided all bets were off, I’d return to the shop and finish the book, curses be damned. Back at the counter, the book lay where I’d left it. The witch bottle on the cover was dark and filled with bones, shells, pins, ichor…  Netherwood, by Jake Arnott… 

Available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Those paying attention to world affairs today know there is something of a ‘hope’ deficit. It is with this in mind that I have chosen to review Barney’s book looking at successful movements ‘driving social change around the world’ or as he calls them, ‘the disruptors’. Each of the groups covered have limited goals and limited success, but taken together give cause for at least some hope!

In his introduction, Barney touches on the double-edged sword of hope for change versus reality, so he is not a naive optimist, which makes his book all the more beneficial. His introduction talks about Just Stop Oil, and their relatively successful early ‘nonviolent direct action’ and much more successful ‘marketing’, but also the limits imposed by changing legislation aimed at smothering people-powered lobby groups. In this case, that was Suella Braverman’s amendments to the Public Order Act of 1986. And, since the book was written, we have seen ‘Labour’ extending the reach of legislation to stop any protests they don’t like, and even ensuring police action continues despite the courts overruling the government. This is, of course, an unacceptable attack on our civil liberties, and taken alongside other extensions of policing of protest from the Thatcher era, the Criminal Justice Act of the early 90s, and Blair’s reforms after the 2000 petrol strike, gives the framework for future governments to enforce a police state clampdown on us all.

Nevertheless, amongst the weeds and cobbles there is still hope for new shoots to sprout. The trick is ‘how to achieve social change’ despite the obstacles. Barney has, as he puts it, ‘met and quizzed activists, lawyers, political scientists, campaigners, graffiti artists, anthropologists, peace-builders, hacktivists, charity directors, authors, Olympians, refugees, researchers and every other kind of change agent you can think of. For this book.’

TEN PARTS BY THEME

He takes a global approach, from Greta Thunberg, through Black Lives Matter, to Greek refugee NGOs and reconciliation activists in the Sahal. The book is divided by theme into ten parts. The first addresses environmentalist groups, such as Extinction Rebellion and Freetown Christiania; the second, race-related activism and education. In part three, Barney looks at issues around abortion law in Turkey and in Ireland, and the social movements fighting for justice during Brazil’s ‘Zika crisis’. The fourth part is ‘Health and Healing – Creative Confrontation’, and touches on mental health politics, drug legalisation, and the ‘wall museum’ in Palestine – the latter is especially poignant given the genocidal war that has no doubt destroyed such initiatives since.

In the fifth section Barney looks at legal roots to change in Spain; Mary Hwyere’s ‘International Alert’ group, building peace by confronting trauma in the Sahal; and the Columbian peace accords. Parts six and seven cover the fightback against censorship and repression in Albania, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey. Part eight takes on hacktivism in Iran and resistance to internet control in Ethiopia. This latter has global importance today. At the time of writing, Barney records that ‘whilst there have been policies restricting access to the internet across the world, they had arguably never been attempted on the scale seen in Ethiopia’ in 2016. Attempts to control access to Facebook, YouTube and ‘X’ have since become ubiquitous from China to here in the UK; banning VPNs to those without digital proof of identity; the ‘great firewall of China’ that former Hastings MP Amber Rudd advocated for copying in Britain, and that Starmer gives every sign of also wishing to perpetrate, all seek to censor and control dissent. As with the clampdown on protest in the streets, this adds to an arsenal of dubious control that is just begging for a paranoid extremist future government to misuse even more blatantly than today. Analysing successful methods of resisting this is imperative.

Part nine looks at refugees and asylum seekers, in the face of state attempts to effectively criminalise NGOs seeking to help them. Speaking of Greek attempts to shut down humanitarian support, Ellim Xenou of charity ‘Doctors of the World’ states that ‘the new asylum law and the defaming and blaming of NGOs…  they are all different pieces of the same puzzle that is to make refugees and migrants lives unbearable so as not to create a pull factor for more to come to Europe. [Yet] ethnocentric policies may add a challenge – a barrier – but you don’t put an end to the people’s hope for a future, for a better life, for peace this way.’ The last chapter in part nine addresses women’s rights in sports in Qatar.

The last part looks at the role of Human Rights Watch and Legal Agenda in Lebanon, and the relative success at the time Barney was writing of anti-corruption protests in Israel, which, like Just Stop Oil here, used non-violent direct action in the form of roadblocks. Sadly, the military events that have taken place since 2023 will have negated any successes. Then Barney looks at anti-Beijing activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with the activist collective Scholarism, and the ‘Umbrella Movement’.

Barney is not unrealistic about the limits of these activist and legalist movements, but sees them as demonstrating ‘the imagination, independent thought and optimism fundamental to all social change movements’, the importance of international links, and of solidarity and ‘shared leadership’. Activism for positive change is a ‘permanent revolution’, with a step forward here and a step back there, but the green shoots persist. To quote Galaxy Quest, “Never give up, never surrender!”

By Laleh Khalili
Published by Profile, 2025, rrp £11.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

Khalili’s new book is unexpectedly timely. Its subtitle is ‘how commodities and cronyism drive the global economy’. It is a short and accessible introduction to ‘the backbone of globalization’, which she sees as ‘low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control’.

Amongst the subjects here are shipping lanes and container ships, assaults on unionisation, assaults on national autonomy, and the major extractive mineral industries. She also covers the construction of China’s belt & roads ‘new silk route’. The ‘cronyism’ chapters take a well-aimed swipe at commodity traders and ‘super-yacht’ owning billionaires, private equity and ‘management consulting’, the offshoring of capital, and the ‘shell game’ of company registration and flags of convenience.

So, ‘extractive’ here is about asset-stripping through financialisation measures, deregulation, and privatisation. And ‘special economic zones’ and freeports are, of course, central to this for us in the UK. Since at least the 1980s ‘Reaganomics’ free market extremism through to Brexit and the current phases of what I call ‘Operation Asset-Strip UK’, our financial and material assets have been subject to a garage sale that will leave us floundering in a financial black hole. The recent Chinese sell-off of $688 billion of US Treasury debt will severely impact the US economy and naturally their pain will be offloaded to US vassal states, of which we are one.

NEW US IMPERIALISM

‘Extractive’ also includes minerals, rare earth metals, sand and oil. I wrote a recent review on the former issues, about the book The War Below. On the latter issues, not many people will be aware of the monstrous size of global sand movements, and the environmental catastrophes developed economies inflict on sand-rich river and beach communities (because of their demand for concrete).

Oil, other minerals, and shipping lanes, though, are the key items that make Khalili’s book even more relevant than when she wrote it. The hard question is ‘where to start’! 2026 is unfolding as an especially concerning inflection point, and we are already careering faster than ever down the wrong track.

At the heart of our current crisis is the new US imperialism. The Monroe Doctrine was first stated in 1823, and posited that anything that occurred in the domestic politics of central American states was the direct business of the USA. It was a formalised sign of things to come – for example, if you dared elect a left-wing government, the USA regarded it as just fine to back a coup and install a puppet-government, no matter how vicious. The two centuries since President Monroe’s imperialist policy has seen the doctrine extended, frankly, to the whole planet. January 2026 has seen it rebadged as the Donroe Doctrine, in response primarily to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and his threats to annex Greenland. I wrote about the latter five years ago for HIP, in a review of a book on Arctic Security, at which time it was already eight years after Trump first voiced his imperialist policies for the Arctic.

CURSE OF ‘INTERESTING TIMES’

In both cases, oil and other minerals are a core concern, though for Greenland we can add a potential ice-free north-west passage and a climate change-induced freeing up of the Arctic Ocean for competitive resource extraction. This is code for a cold war with Russia and Europe over who can get in there first, with a real risk of hot war attached.

Meanwhile, Trump is also wanting to break BRICS and force Iran, one way or the other, to open up to US markets, and resource extraction. This has been a long game for the USA: having ousted a democratic government in 1953, and installed a murderous regime (remember, ‘he may be a bastard, but he’s OUR bastard’ is US policy), and then being embarrassed on the world stage by the ‘Iran hostage crisis’ as a different regime took over that was not going to play ball with the West, the USA has long planned revenge. Khalili writes here about ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’, which has included shelling Yemen into the stone age and embargoing Iranian oil, which is the tip of an evil iceberg in undermining the Iranian nation. I don’t know how many fronts Trump wishes to open up at the same time, especially as the China-Taiwan crisis is also hotting up, never mind Ukraine.

None of it seems wise, and I believe the curse of living through ‘interesting times’ may be very much in play.

Extractive Capitalism is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Guy Shrubsole is the author of the bestselling The Lost Rainforests of Britain. His latest book, out now in paperback, includes some of the remnants of our temperate rainforest, along with 92% of English land – land we have no right to roam upon. Indeed, much of the 8% left over upon which we may walk is privately owned. The recent farce over camping on Dartmoor highlights this for us, and Guy, who himself lives in Devon, covers the court case over access here. The book went to print before the victory was won against the landowners last month – judges unanimously dismissed an appeal by Alexander and Diana Darwall against a 2023 ruling upholding Dartmoor Commons Act.

Lewis Winks of protest group Right to Roam, in an article in the Exeter Observer, said “Dartmoor remains the only place in England and Wales where the public has a right to wild camp and can lawfully experience the magic of sleeping under the stars. And the fact that one wealthy landowner, Alexander Darwall, was able to temporarily remove a right that belonged to everyone, demonstrates how England’s system of access is utterly broken.” ‘He added: “The Labour Government must now pass a new Right to Roam Act to defend and extend the public’s rights to access nature in England. Ministers must urgently change the law not only to protect the right to wild camp on Dartmoor from future challenges, but to expand the public’s right of responsible access to the wider countryside.”

‘AN END TO FEUDALISM’

Shrubsole’s hardback edition The Lie of the Land was subtitled ‘Who really cares for the countryside’. The paperback is more combative, with the new subtitle ‘How a tiny group of landowners wrecked the countryside, and how the public can restore it’. The book takes a look at who owns the countryside, how many landowners propagandise about what a great job they do as stewards and suggest the ‘townies’ will just treat the countryside as a garbage dump. Shrubsole gives this elitist claim short shrift. He gives us many examples of how these self-professed ‘guardians of the land’ in fact cause great damage. This ranges from agricultural run-off, through destructive alteration of the course of rivers and degradation of wetland including SSSIs, to the effect rape of the land has in the name of grouse and pheasant hunting for toffs. The latter alone causes immense destruction of our native flora and fauna for a sport which accounts for per annum CO2 emissions of half a billion tons. At the same time, he acknowledges and praises those landowners that do in fact care for their land.

All this makes for a fascinating read, and I recommend it. And I could fill this review with the dastardly behaviour of our elites – but in fact, the best thing about the book is its sections dealing with the second half of its new subtitle, how we can address stewardship and ownership issues. As Shrubsole notes, currently ‘in a country where 1 per cent of the population owns half of all England, such decisions are made by a tiny elite’. One clear change required to begin to solve pressing issues around degradation of our natural environment, and urgently enhancing the sustainability of our native food supply, is a widening of involvement in decision-making. It is an uphill struggle, landowners are rich, influential, and often angry – in 1983 effigies of conservationists on the Somerset Levels were hung by the neck by farmers opposed to plans to rewet drained wetlands.

The focus on England is tempered by reference to the various successes in protecting land, beyond the right to roam, in Scotland. Shrubsole gives over a fair few pages to the public acquisition of vast swathes of the former Buccleuch Estate, and what the Scottish government fairly describe as ‘an end to feudalism’, focussing on community ownership as well as the right to access. Centuries after the eviction of Highlanders from the land they lived on and farmed by arrogant lairds who could be richer with sheep than tenants, the ancestors of the victims of the clearances in Sutherland now have the right to buy the land. A Heritage Trust now owns the Isle of Eigg… Needless to say, in England we remain quite definitely ‘feudal’, with a disproportionate amount of land still owned by earls, barons, and lords granted vast acreage after the Norman Conquest. Globally, more and more land is owned by venture  capitalists, and even Utah’s Mormon Church. And changes of governance under Thatcher ‘closed down debate about the public ownership of land for a generation’.

‘THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM’ LAND OWNERSHIP

So, read this excellent book all the way through! But, here I will round off this review with a quick potted rundown of Shrubsole’s main recommendations for action. He says that reform must be a democratic process, a million miles from where we are now. There must be stricter prioritisation, as much land is deemed ‘multi-use’ that in fact has quite narrow requirements if it is to be protected, such as our vanishing wetlands. One might mention the disconnect between those who think we can address the decimation of our forests through massive monoculture plantations, and those who see that different biomes should be seeded with appropriate native trees and flora in order to recover. And none of this means diddle-squat without addressing ‘the elephant in the room’, land ownership. To do this requires agriculture and forestry be bought into the planning system, as, unbelievably, they are not!

He finishes on a ten-point programme, beginning with protecting our greatest carbon sinks, moorland and the fens, and banning moorland burning and grouse-shooting. King Charles, our supposedly ‘green’ royal wouldn’t like that. Second, institute a community right to buy in England. Third, use public money to ‘buy land for nature’. Fourth, levy a carbon land tax on polluting landowners. Fifth, stop letting landowners unleash hundreds of thousands of imported pheasants on the land in shooting season (indeed, why not ban shooting?). Sixth, create a ‘right of responsible access’ giving the public rights to become whistleblowers when finding nefarious land practices on yer lordship’s manor. Seventh, let national parks serve the interests of nature, especially important now rare-metal rich uplands such as Dartmoor are now technically within the new ‘enterprise zones’. Eighth, ‘put in place a land use framework for England and open up data on land’. Ninth, ‘require landowners to give an account of their stewardship’, Shrubsole’s ‘Ecological Domesday Book’, and, tenth, not a policy suggestion, ‘but a plea to everyone reading this book’ – ‘Join campaigns to hold landowners to account and change the laws of the land’.

We cannot go back to ‘subsistence rights on the common land’, as once granted under the Carta de Foresta, not with a UK population of 70 million people, but we can and must be activists for change. Scotland is proving it works. Solidarity is the way.

The Lie of the Land is available at a specially reduced price from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road
TN34 1RE

This new book by locally based author and poet Paul Green channels the spirit of J G Ballard. It features seven stories, and three essays. Paul is a few years older than myself, but we share considerable cultural influences. These might be described rather simplistically as encompassing elements of sixties counter-culture, eighties cyberpunk and nineties ‘Mondo2000’ alternative tech-oriented culture, all subsumed in the nineties, by, I believe, Forbidden Planet bookshop in, then, New Oxford Street, under the banner ‘Slipstream’. Authors in this category, which spans fiction, non-fiction, and pseudo-fiction, include: William Burroughs, Noam Chomsky, Brian Aldiss, Timothy Leary, Iain Banks, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, William T Vollmann, Robert Anton Wilson, and even perhaps Erich von Daniken.

And, of course, Jim Ballard. Paul and I were both influenced by Ballard. This shows in much of Paul’s writing, but comes to the fore in this excellent new collection. One of the essays looks at some of the tropes that appear in Ballard’s work, through the lens of one of his early novels, The Wind From Nowhere. Paul thanks David Pringle, former editor of the great UK SF magazine Interzone, a worthy successor to New Worlds, for his feedback on the essay. In the early nineties I had read a piece on Pringle’s fascination with Ballard. Interzone ran a competition, which I entered, to ‘rewrite Alien as if novelised by Ballard instead of Alan Dean Foster’. I pitched my entry towards Pringle’s take on Ballard, coming, as I recall, second in the competition – my entry is buried in a box somewhere in the Interzone archives at Liverpool University. The winning entry was printed, it took a minor liberty, adding ‘…and directed by David Cronenberg’ and was very good.

PAUL COVERS THESE TOUCHSTONE TROPES WELL

Reading Paul’s stories reminded me of my own tribute to Ballardian obsessions. Few have captured his tone and ecology of ideas as well as Paul has. Some of the early stories of Eric Brown, in his The Time-lapsed Man come to mind.

Ballard was a bit of an existentialist. His leading, male, characters reflect this philosophy. His female characters are of his time; in my imagination they are often highly-strung and faded, clinging to an outmoded comfort-zone, looking perhaps a bit like Nanette Newman. They are usually living in suburbia, or post-apocalyptic hotels, amongst jaded middle-class professionals. There is often an eccentric public school antagonist. The time-space the main character occupies is as much the ‘inner space’ of the mind as it is the external environment, and the latter is often arguably an existential extrusion of that mind.

It is often assumed that Ballard’s childhood, interred by the Japanese in Shanghai during the war, followed by post-war London, and in later life suburbia in the form of Shepperton is the key to his mentality. No doubt there is more to it than that, but his memories of the camp and of the austerity of post-war England are I think central to the atmosphere of novels, such as The Drought, The Crystal World, and The Drowned World – perhaps, too, in some aspects of one of my favourite Ballard novels, Hello America. One way or another, deserts are the heart of his most elemental novels and stories. Paul covers these touchstone tropes well in his stories, and explicates them in his essay on ‘The Poetics of ‘Studio 5, The Stars’, which inhabits the ambience of the collection Vermilion Sands. One of my favourite shorts appears here, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.

A CLASSIC TAKE ON BALLARDIAN APOCALYPSE STORIES

Paul channels other threads in Ballard’s work, especially in his story Monaco, which has shades of Crash, The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, though he doesn’t go so far out as the Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibition here.

I think my favourite stories here are The Final Analysis, The Seismic World, and Shadow People. The former inhabits an alternate reality where the UK has joined the war in Vietnam, and the Russians have also arrived there, Profumo is PM, and characters include Jim and his friend Christopher Evans, in Wimbledon instead of Shepperton, but in different roles to our world, and a very Jim-esque lead in David Carlson. Carlson works for a trade rag, ‘Plastic World’, whereas Ballard worked for the trade rag, ‘Chemistry and Industry’. Paul has placed a number of amusing parallels amongst his work here. Seismic World is a classic take on Ballardian apocalypse stories, especially, perhaps, The Wind from Nowhere. The latter story, Shadow People, I like because I find it redolent of classic paranoid kids’ TV such as Time-Slip, Quatermass, and Children of the Stones, as well as of Ballard himself. It may recycle 70s TV, but ‘hauntology’ and ‘psychogeography’ have rendered nostalgia for that era current once more.

Highly recommended.

Terminal Transmissions is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

On December 7th this year, Bookbuster ran a stall at the Mint House in Pevensey. This was a great venue for an esoteric fayre, and this one, ‘Making Misrule’, is just their latest makers’ market. Alongside crafts, tarot stalls, and tattooists, there was folk-music and a mummers play: Hastings was well represented. In the evening, the fabulous Goblin Band had a sold-out concert, playing a variety of folk-music of the British Isles.

The contemporary folk-revival has not lost any momentum, and, amongst the best-selling books and zines, pride of place still goes to Hellebore and Weird Walk. The former just put out their second Yuletide special, already shifting fast. It follows hot on the heels of their twelfth issue, ‘story-telling’ themed, which landed just in time for Samhain.

The first piece in issue 12 covers 1980s ‘dark fantasy’, featuring Bowie as the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and other cult movies, including The Dark Crystal, and The Company of Wolves. Other pieces discuss Robin Hood, Tam Lin, and the Fairy Queen, plus features on storytellers Susanna Clark and Alan Garner.

A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS

The Hellebore Yule special, ‘a summoning of seasonal terrors’, has the wonderfully named Verity Holloway ‘summoning the spirit’ of the Black Prince of Cornwall. There are also articles by Keri O’Shea on the Woman in Black; John Callow on the black dog of Isle of Man’s Peel Castle; and editor Maria J Perez Cuervo spooking us out about Uncanny Children. Other essays here give us an eldritch peek at yuletide hauntings, ghosts sightings, spiritualism and other ‘metaphysical mysteries’. As ever, Hellebore is a quality zine, and has excellent artwork throughout.

Weird Walk’s latest offerings are a taster for Ben Edge’s super new book Folklore Rising, in the form of a highly illustrated zine entitled ‘Folklore Activist’, and pamphlet, ‘Cromlech’, about the kistvaen named ‘Devil’s Den’ in Wiltshire. This is one of the UK’s best dolmens. Its history is discussed, alongside copious and moody photographs. A must for the ‘modern antiquarian’ fans.

New zines are popping up all the time alongside these classic publications. Two of the more recent ones are Wort and Occulture. The latter is subtitled ‘a warning to the curious’, and they have issued their third and fourth zines this year, one a Special, the ‘cinema issue’, and also volume 2 of their ‘ordinary’ edition, this one themed ‘the devil’s party’. The zines all feature ace collage art, and in this latest offering talk about ‘mass possessions’, satanism, ‘the demonic feminine’, and pieces on the devil and demons. George Parr writes of the devil in the English landscape, calling him ‘Britain’s biggest loser’.

A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE PAST AND FUTURE

Meanwhile, Wort, ‘a journal of radical, rooted relational herbalism’, hits its second issue. This has poetry and fiction, but primary esoterically inclined non-fiction. Katie Hastings (not from Hastings!) and Sinead Fortune write on ‘saving seeds’. Katie tells about a Welsh seed-saving collective, Llafur Ni, who are reviving rare ‘black oats’; Sinead tells about the ‘seed sovereignty programme UK’. Then we get a feature on the ‘Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library’, based in the West Bank. Clearly, they are somewhat beleaguered by their neighbours who show no respect for the past and target artefacts that show a long history for Arab people there. Consequently the collective running the project seek to preserve seeds from the Makhrour Valley, an area that has signs of irrigation systems going back 4000 years. ‘Preserving and propagating seeds draws a bridge between the past and future.’ Other articles cover ‘planet medicine and the tarot’, ‘foraging as resistance; an artist’s use of woad, ‘Slavic oak’, Hasujiku Tanaka on the ginkgo tree, and more.

Hellebore’s blurb describes the zine as a ‘tribute to the supernatural richness of Britain’. This is, I think, true of most of this new generation of folkloric zines. They fit right in with the spectrum of contemporary culture from Mark Fisher’s Weird & the Eerie, through hauntology, psychogeography, and Julian Cope’s antiquarian writings, to more practical esoterica as represented by Wort, and the resurgence of interest in ‘folk horror’, especially in both cinema – nicely book-ended by the Wicker Man and Midsommer – and zine culture. Long may it last. Happy Yuletide, one and all!

All zines reviewed available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

The Weird Walk zine has been selling well at Bookbuster for a while now, and has reached issue #6, as well as putting out one-off zines, Magic Circle, Ritual, and new-in, Leyline. But now they have gifted us a really lovely book. There is little overlap, though zine features get mentioned along the way, between book and zine. Naturally, though, the book follows the format and explores ‘wanderings and wonderings through the British ritual year’. Author attribution is to itself, though I assume Owen Tromans is behind much of it.

Weird Walk, the book, is divided into sections by season, beginning with Spring. Under each section a selection of spooky places gets examined, and a short list of regional events to match each season is given. As you may expect, Hastings Jack-in-the-Green gets a mention in ‘Spring’, and the Lewes Bonfire in ‘Autumn’.

A FOLKLORIC RAMBLING GUIDE

Choices of places to examine for walks are many and varied. Though predominantly sites chosen have neolithic stone circles or burial mounds, a number of ‘weird walks’ are through more recent landscapes. The definition of ‘weird’ is signposted by various other inherently vague concepts, such as ‘uncanny’, ‘haunted’, and ‘liminal’, essentially, you know it when you see / feel it! The preamble describes the book as taking ‘the form of a folkloric rambling guide; a gazetteer of the physical, historical, and magical landscapes of the isles, and the customs and traditions that arose around them’.

The zeitgeist is rich with references to ‘hauntology’ these days, and it is a key idea behind Weird Walk. Although coined by Derrida, it has become common usage through The Wire magazine’s application of it to a certain brand of ‘retro’ ‘spooky’ music, such as Burial, Kode9, all the artists on the Ghost Box label, Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s 1970s radio and TV soundtracks, to name just a few. The late Mark Fischer popularised it, too. It is a close cousin to ‘psychogeography’, as exemplified by Peter Ackroyd’s early novels, and the stories gifted us by occasional St Leonards resident Iain Sinclair, and Gareth Rees. The musician John Foxx recently produced a spoken-word album that, too, is centred on the hauntological and the psychogeographic.

AUTONOMOUS SENSORY MERIDIAN RESPONSE

Touchstones for the movement, if we dare call it such, are Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass, and his Stone Tapes. Also, The Children of the Stones, filmed in Avebury and referencing the old Christianising custom of interpreting the stones as petrified dancers, as described in Weird Walk in the chapter on the nearby megaliths at Stanton Drew. In such cases the audio effects and music queues are a fundamental element of the atmosphere created. Many of us drawn anyway to neolithic sites such as Avebury and Stonehenge get a more or less ‘tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine’, peddled as ‘autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) not only in visiting such sites – also described in the book, as ‘an uncanny disruption’ – but also from a shared nostalgia for these cultural tropes.

The book gives eight walks to each season. Here I will give examples, two from each season: Spring includes Cerne Abbas in Dorset and the Druid’s Temple in North Yorkshire; Summer, Castlerigg in Cumbria and the hill of the White Horse at Uffington; Autumn, Coldrum Long Barrow in Kent and Fernworthy Forest on Dartmoor; and Winter gives us Wiltshire’s Silbury Hill and the ultimate liminal zone after Dungeness, Dunwich Beach in Norfolk, of which ‘it is said that if you find yourself alone at high tide…the bells on the sunken churches can still be heard ringing out from the depths’. Each site has a fascinating potted history given before the route of an actual walk is broached.

WE LOVE THIS WEIRD, DIVERSE, HAUNTED PLACE

There are excellent anecdotes throughout the book too. For example, the entry for Padstow notes that Edward Woodward, who starred in another hauntological touchstone, The Wicker Man, is interred there. In the Stanton Drew chapter the Worzels founder, ‘North Somerset legend Adge Cutler’, gets a look in. It seems only right that the chapter on Avebury references another superb book on our spookiest heritage, Julian Cope’s Modern Antiquarian. The chapter on Castlerigg has a fascinating aside chronicling the trade in Langdale stone axes, giving us a brief glimpse of the reach of Neolithic trade routes. Many of the sites used for winter solstice rituals were much larger than you might conclude from the remains we see today and we now believe people travelled to the most special of these, such as Stonehenge and Orkney’s Barnhouse Neolithic Settlement, from far away, in the latter case possibly as far away as Norway, Shetland, and the Western Isles.

The Kent chapter speculates about leylines and notes other nearby mythic sites along the Pilgrim’s Way, such as Kit’s Coty, and speculates that this ancient track may have extended through the Salisbury Plain mega site as far as the Somerset complex. Just in time for Halloween, the chapter on the Rollright Stones gives an insight into the injustices of the witch hunts. At the ‘very centre of England’ lies Lud’s Church, associated with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the location of a novel by another uncanny storyteller, Alan Garner, a ‘must visit’ amongst this great selection.

A minor criticism is that each could benefit from a map alongside the text although O/S references are given. But this is easily forgiven. Weird Walk can be summed up with a quote from EF Benson, who wrote about the liminal zones at Dunwich and Romney Marsh: here you can meet ‘something out of the past, some condition of life long vanished, […] leaking through into the present’. The author(s?), after trawling around Britain’s byways, ‘found that we love this weird, diverse, haunted place even more than we did when we started’. Now, it’s our turn!

Essay by Tim Barton

Milan Kundera said that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.

Writing this month, Robin Artisson said that ‘from 1688 till now, the social and political influence of the monarchy was waning, until they became what they are now: almost pure figureheads’ then gave a brief precis of the world-spanning global power of the English ‘East India Company’ (‘the first truly massively powerful international corporation’) and of the rise of Capital. He clearly positions the contemporary monarchy well outside of this colonialist horror show. Of the late lamented Queen, he says, ‘I’m sure she wasn’t some portrait of “progressivism” as it is known today, but it is beyond any charitable or reasonable appraisal to imagine she was the genocide-loving reptile that half my feed seems to think she was’.

This perspective has been, in one form or another, very visible in social media responses to her death. Few, even anti-monarchists, have not acknowledged the steadfast and dignified way in which she filled her role. Obviously, the picture is simplistic, as is the wave of hatred from a few quarters: yet, both have a kernel of truth to them. One of the richest families in Europe, or even the world, the royals are decidedly not ‘outside the system’, or beyond criticism. The huge revenues from offshore wind farms are a quarter of the Crown Estates, for example.

Kundera’s quote is pertinent in so far as the wave of public feeling over the Queen’s death is, yes, blind to certain realities; but so, clearly, is the more extreme negative narrative coming from other quarters, especially on social media. Another aspect of Kundera’s point may be John Philpot Curran’s statement, ‘The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt’. And it is here that one must question, not Queen Elizabeth, but the institution she headed, whether ‘disempowered’ or not.

SO MUCH FOR THE ‘ROYAL PREROGATIVE’

The truth is, of course, that the ‘rubber-stamping’ of Acts of Parliament is, whilst famously what her political role was reduced to, not quite accurate. Not merely through the influence accruing to over-weening wealth, but of course also through the overly-respectful attitude in which monarchy is held by this country’s establishment, and its disempowered and some-times feckless general population. What a monarch might express privately, in or out of Privy Council, is undoubtedly important to our political classes.

The Constitution Unit says that ‘as the ultimate guardian of the constitution, the Queen has power to dismiss a Prime Minister who refuses to resign after losing the confidence of the House of Commons; and in future the Queen may be expected to refuse an untimely request for prorogation, lest it be declared unlawful’. This unlawfulness comes from William of Orange’s Bill of Rights. Not only is it clear that Johnson was acting illegally in constitutional terms by proroguing Parliament, it was also within the monarch’s power to curb such excesses no matter now little power she may have constitutionally exercised elsewhere.

I think it was a mistake to force the courts to make that judgement and be pilloried for it, though no doubt her advisors would have seen her doing it as possibly harmful to the monarchy as an institution. She must have known it was unlawful. Johnson has since passed Acts that include new guidance on prorogation and other mechanisms to dissolve Parliament, guidance which has yet to be tested in constitutional law. A new Bill of Rights could simply override the one written after the Glorious Revolution, but until that is so his new Acts remain constitutionally dubious. A very good overview of these Acts appears in Ferdinand Mount’s essay ‘Shades of Peterloo’, in the July 7th London Review of Books. Johnson has gone a long way toward making Parliamentary sovereignty a nonsense, extending the already over-weening and dubious power of the Executive yet further, something that, too, should have been within the monarch’s power to curb. So much for the ‘royal prerogative’.

Still, most observers will agree that as head of state and commonwealth she did a respectable and consistent job.

NOT ALL MONARCHS ARE AS POPULAR AS ELIZABETH WAS

But what of the role of our monarchy going forward? What message does Charles touring Britain with Truss in tow send? What, really, should we make of the ‘black spider memos’? Will Charles more actively pursue his life-long obsession with population control? Will the public reject future royals, due to the clearly feckless personalities of those lined up for succession behind Charles? Given the tabloid sensibilities of much of the public, a few ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ antics may simply endear them even more.

Ultimately, I am a ‘republican’. It is all too clear that a functioning and empowered monarchy is a dangerous way to confer power generation to generation. Not all monarchs, by any means, are as popular as Elizabeth was. That her powers were strictly limited is a boon to democrats. What role, really, even this attenuated ‘monarchy’ has going forward I do not know. Alternatives are often proffered on a Platonic model, one where a president, or ‘philosopher-king’ as he had it, has supreme power over the public he or she may claim to ‘represent’; one where poets and artists are seen as fostering dissent and so are oppressed; one where, if elected, Britain’s feckless public would fill the post with the most outspoken narcissist in town.

An ‘American’ model is little better, though more concerned with the trappings of democracy. Here, we do not use our schooling system to create citizens, so merely have the ‘form’ of a democracy, but not enough functioning citizens to really be one (and then, there’s the archaic misery of ‘first past the post’); there, the post-war economic hegemony of Capital, combined with an extremist interpretation of ‘freedom’, dooms the American Republic to ultimate failure. Too few of us think of another ‘republic’, one based on biomes, anti-hierarchy, and bottom-up. On which note, in a future review I will look at John P Clark’s The Impossible Community, which addresses the later republican model.

• Robert Hardman’s biography ‘Our Queen’ is available at Bookbuster, as are Plato’s ‘Republic’, and John P Clark’s
‘The Impossible Community’.

There’s nothing quite like that feeling of stepping into a bookshop. As a child I loved to read. My first experience of a bookshop was how I imagine Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy felt exiting the wardrobe and entering the magical world of Narnia. Initially overwhelmed by what is in front of you, trying to take it all in – although I must admit the only fauns or talking lions in my local store were between the covers. Nowadays I rarely go into a store with a particular book in mind. Instead I find myself grabbing something unknown off the shelf, eagerly anticipating my next adventure. 

But in this modern age, filled with Amazon, Kindles and audiobooks, this experience is likely to become less frequent. Aren’t we all guilty from time to time of ordering online with just a click of a button and having items delivered straight to the door? But in the past couple of years online shopping is not the only problem facing independent bookstores.

Balance the Books

Hastings is lucky enough to have several brilliant independent bookshops in the area, from Bookbuster and Printed Matter in Queen’s Road to The Hastings Bookshop in Trinity Street and the intriguingly diverse Hare and Hawthorn on George Street. Bookbuster’s name – and sign – was inspired by by its former occupants: Blockbuster video. As you enter the shop, it looks as if it’s about to burst with the huge stacks of books that owner Tim Barton manages to squeeze into the relatively small area. Tim is hoping to reach the store’s tenth anniversary later this year but admits that it has been tough financially and that he has only barely scraped through, with the help of a few Covid support grants. In the run-up to Christmas, he began to really feel the effect of the pandemic. His online sales were the same in November and December as they were in September – when they should have been four times higher. 

Brexit was another major factor for the decline in online orders: “I noticed certain changes in the market from January. A third of my online sales were from Europe but I have had only one order since January from outside this country,” he says. “Because the UK doesn’t have a customs union deal, each European country can set their own tariffs and VAT and import charges, so most people trying to order books and records from the UK will potentially be paying double, depending on which country they are in. It has kicked a huge hole in the internet sales.” 

Conscientious Consumerism

Many people had much more time to read during the lockdowns and needed books, but that didn’t mean that local booksellers were in profit, since their stores had to shut due to the government’s restrictions. Lee Humphries, owner of the Printed Matter Bookshop told HIP that it was difficult to make any money during the pandemic, as he could only accept mail orders on his website. He did also offer door-to-door deliveries to customers in the local area whilst the shop was shut, something many bookstores across the UK adopted. Lee says he had always wanted to open a shop since he was in his 20s, but then it wasn’t financially viable – he had to wait until 2017 before he finally fulfilled his goal.

The pandemic resulted in some people adopting a sense of conscientious consumerism, choosing to buy from their local businesses rather than the massive chains and high street brands. Lee says some locals are now more inclined to buy from his store rather than sites like Amazon: “There are some people that come in and say that they think Amazon and Waterstones have enough money, so I’d rather just give it to you,” he says. “They will then send me links from Amazon and ask if I can order certain books in for them.”

But while some stores struggled as a result of the pandemic, others saw it as an opportunity. Charlie Crabb has been a bookseller since he was 15, and many of his family ply their trade in the book industry – his mum and dad were both booksellers in London before moving into publishing, whilst his uncle is also a publisher. But it wasn’t until the pandemic hit and he was furloughed that he thought about opening The Hastings Bookshop in Trinity Street.

“I was working at Waterstones when everything was shut and everyone was put on furlough. I started looking at smaller independent book shops to see what they were doing and how they were able to keep on going,” he says.

“I felt that if there was ever a time to open up a book shop, it was now, and although there were some good independent bookshops in Hastings already, it seemed like there was an opening for a business in this particular part of town.”

Competing with the Big Hitters

Until the 1990s the Net Book Agreement ensured a fixed price agreement between publishers and booksellers with no discounting allowed. Terry Maher, head of the bookshop chain Dillons, was one of the people calling for the agreement to be torn up. In 1997 the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) declared the agreement illegal. Maher had succeeded although his business didn’t – Dillons was subsumed by Waterstones shortly after. 

The dissolution of the agreement made it vastly harder for independent booksellers across the country to compete with larger high street chains like WH Smith and Waterstones. Publishers gave the large booksellers massive discounts for volume, enabling them to significantly undercut the independents. Many saw it as the beginning of the end of smaller local bookshops. It seemed they were right. Between 1995 and 2016 the number of member stores in the Booksellers Association dropped from 1,894 to 867. But not all hope is lost – over the last five years
there has been a gradual rise in independent bookstores with numbers hitting 1,027 in 2021. 

Charlie Crabb believes this rise is in some ways comparable to the popularity of vinyl in recent years. “The same thing happened with records. Records were dead supposedly. Why would you want to go buy a record for £20 when you could buy it for £2 or £3 online or even stream it for free? But it is because people want to go into that physical space and browse and hold this object.” he says. “I think it’s amazing how many bookshops are opening now and that there are so many in Hastings which can all offer something different.”

By Noam Chomsky, Robert Pollin and C J Polychroniou

Published by Verso Books, 2020, paperback rrp £12.99 / Bookbuster price £10.99

Review Tim Barton

A fortnight ago, the government signed an international agreement to ‘save nature’, key elements of which are “a renewed effort to reduce deforestation, halt unsustainable fishing practices, eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies and begin the transition to sustainable food production systems and a circular economy over the next decade” (the Guardian, 28/09/20).

Last week’s government announced measures to ‘ban’ anti-capitalist resources in schools is an attempt to stifle dissent. As to whether they can really roll this out, I can’t comment, but I can advise all teachers to give the government the finger and teach Marxist, and other post- and anti-capitalist ideas more overtly. Economics, Sociology and Geography are in essence partially in hock to ideas that are, by most interpretations, rather anti-capitalist. The Tory war on the Liberal Arts, begun most overtly by the philistine Gove, is reaching a crescendo, and a very dangerous one at that.

A ‘new green deal’ and ‘saving nature’ are clearly not compatible with a rapacious free-market market ideology. The brand of capitalism sourced in the Austrian and Chicago Schools of Economics, then promulgated globally via Reaganomics and Thatcherism, is now ubiquitous. It runs 100% counter to any resource-use reduction or pollution controls. It also guarantees unjust ‘devil take the hindmost’ first world elites will pick and choose who will survive the ravaging of the planet. Any just solution has to manage the economy to ensure equity in ‘solutions’, and viable solutions that can potentially avert war, famine and collapse. 

Intervention (of whatever kind, but here the emphasis is on ecology) is by definition, especially in the neoliberal model, anti-capitalist. Thus, this government reveals who truly holds the puppet-strings in our economy – not ‘the people’, as our so-called ‘democratic’ forms of governance might lead many to believe, as, clearly, the current economic model benefits primarily the rich and bred-to-rule elites. A shift from capitalist modes of economy is now more urgent than ever, yet the rats in the corner are (predictably) fighting dirtier by the day. As the Irish saying has it, ‘you can’t get there from here’.

As more and more people question the ‘status quo’, the government seeks to crack down harder and harder on dissent. The branding of Extinction Rebellion as ‘terrorists’ is yet another example. The irony is we need youth to engage with change, and urgently. Questioning how things are, and positing what could be, is more necessary than ever. A ‘democracy’ is not only not run on autocratic lines, but is a place where decisions are made by the people, for the people – and where ‘the people’ are furnished in their schooling by the tools necessary to become Citizens. Education in England has for decades treated the majority as an under-class, to be cajoled and brainwashed, with a minority of born rulers and occasional self-made upstarts told they are ‘better’, that is to say, also brainwashed. In Marxian terms we may talk of all classes being alienated from their true selves, but that lets our rulers off the hook too easily.

Chomsky has for many decades been America’s foremost Left/Anarchist intellectual. In this new book he joins a growing crowd of public intellectuals, including most recently Naomi Klein, in calling loudly and firmly for a green new deal, one that must by necessity have Boris and his gang of pirates frothing at the mouth. Chapter Four addresses specifically the need for ‘Political Mobilization to Save the Planet’, and the Appendix outlines a ‘Framework for Funding the Global Green New Deal’. It is not accidental that the catchphrase ‘New Deal’ has been adopted so widely – after all, the US economy was rebooted from the Great Depression by Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, an economic plan that many libertarians and right-wingers in the US regarded as essentially ‘communist’.

Well, something similar, but global, is an urgent necessity right now, and the UK government have very clearly aligned themselves with the forces of destruction. Chomsky and Pollen debate many of the factors driving the global economy to ecocidal self-destruction: their new book offers an urgent and necessary focus on real change. Buy this book, give copies away at Christmas and ensure it is widely read. Boris won’t like it but future generations truly will.

REVIEW BY P. NOTHER

According to Theresa May, those of us who are against Brexit are Utopians, because as Citizens of Nowhere we live in the ‘No-place’ signified by Sir Thomas More’s neology from the ancient Greek, ‘U-topia’.

Whether May deployed this etymological construct deliberately is unclear. But we can be sure that the current skipper of the Ship of State, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (aka, ‘clever clogs’, with his much-proclaimed familiarity with all things classical and historical) will have spotted the allusion immediately (if, indeed, he had bothered to pay attention). And while he now apparently perceives the great divide as between the “pessimists at home and abroad” who doubt the deliverability of Brexit, and those who believe in the sheer “pluck” and “nerve” of some idealised and transcendental ‘UK Inc’, as a far-right opportunist he will also believe that a society providing equality in all things social, economic, governmental and judicial is a political impossibility. His ‘Dystopia’ aims to satisfy a much more select constituency.

Not so this author. In the light of the technological advances driving world development towards an era of post-scarcity, Aaron Bastani (a co-founder of Novara Media who in June gave a talk at St Mary in the Castle on the eve of the book’s launch) calls for the “full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated”. He argues for his Utopia in some technical detail, aiming to show how to deliver a post-work society enabled by universal basic income in which hi-tech machines produce not for profit but for the people.

But even allowing for the amelioration of all the accelerating global crises (that of scarcity, he says, will be dealt with by off-planet mining!), we can be sure that the post-Neoliberal, cartel capitalists (aka the 1% and their protectors and enablers) who have so far wolfed down most of the proceeds of this Third Great Disruption/Second Machine Age are unlikely to relinquish their rents quietly. And for sure, de Pfeffel’s gang have seized the UK’s front line defences…

More published his vision in 1516, locating his imaginary Utopia on an island in the mouth of a great river off The Americas. The island had once been a headland, separated from the mainland by a channel dug at the command of the state’s first king, Utopos. While Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) sits comfortably in the half-millennial tradition of optimistic utopianism inspired by More’s work, de Pfeffel’s imaginary project belongs to a much older literary trope: that of the Floating Island. Having cast off (‘unchained’) its anchor, de Pfeffel’s Brexit Isle is to head off into the mid-Atlantic, or perhaps float all the way to 51st USA statehood!

Introduced to world literature by Homer in the Odyssey, the trope is more ambiguous and open-ended than the Utopian/Dystopian binary. The hero Ulysses had obtained a leather bag from the god Aeolus, who resides on the floating island of Aeolia. It contains all the winds; all, that is, save the West wind, which is to blow his ship home to Ithaca. But while he sleeps his crew find and open the bag, releasing a tempest that blows them back to Aeolia. Fearing that he must be cursed, Aeolus refuses Ulysses any further help.

Bastani had once argued on behalf of Brexit, opposed in particular to the EU’s neo-colonial trade policies with the developing world.  He changed his position a fortnight before the referendum, arguing in an openDemocracy essay that without a properly thought-through Lexit policy the risks from a far right Brexit would (as they have so proved) be too great. We must all hope that de Pfeffel’s bag of tricks proves of equal bluster to Ulysses’, his journey likewise somehow turned back and his Ship of Clowns finding a new captain and crew.

REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

The values of the Enlightenment were hard won, and harder still for the lower classes. Nonetheless, to the casual observer we’d come a long way since, say, Francis Bacon or the Diggers at St Georges Hill. Yet even as the Bavarian Illuminati formed ‘to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power’ (Wikipedia), so too madness and delusion ran rife – the South Sea bubble, the Mississippi bubble, Tulip mania to name but a few, as described in detail in the 1841 bestseller Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In those volumes Charles Mackay invokes ‘National Delusions’, and sought to debunk ‘alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics’.

PUNCHING EVERY PANIC BUTTON IN EVERY PARENT

We are clearly in a dangerous age of National delusion once again, with a deluge of ‘popular pamphlets’ on multifarious subjects promoting paranoia and foolhardiness, primarily, today, in the form of web pages. The appetite to extrapolate crazy conspiracies and paranoid fantasies from little shreds of contested so-called knowledge is strong, irresistible, but very high in price. From chemtrails, through Brexit, to anti-vaxxers, some believe that the toxifying and disabling narratives of ‘fake news’ spread their evil shadow throughout our society. Lord knows, there are enough real demons to fight, so it should be clear whose interests are served by spreading these delusions around. But, ultimately, no-one is safe – as Robert Bolt has Sir Thomas More say in A Man For All Seasons, ‘do you really think you could stand […] upright in the wind that would blow then?’ An epidemic of fake news is leading to a tidal wave of plague, in the case of the anti-vaccination movement, literal plagues.

The anti-vaccination movement is a classic case of dangerous false information, punching every panic button in every parent, and for the most part believed by those who promulgate it. As a curative, Herlihy and Hagood set out to explain the history of vaccination and the real, not the panic-button, side-effects of current vaccines (because, of course, there are some). They lay to rest the toxic myths around ‘mercury in vaccines’, and address in detail the one report that suggested a link to autism – a report no-one has been able to replicate as it was built on false premises (again, so far as I can tell, not maliciously).

THE EARLY VACCINATIONS WERE FAR LESS SAFE THAN TODAY’S

But the most pertinent chapters contextualise the state of infant, child, and adult mortality before and after the widespread use of intensively safety-tested vaccination, its deep history, and the current precautionary approaches taken by, for example, the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a mother wasn’t deemed a ‘real mother’ until she’d lost at least one baby child to disease. Outbreaks of plague would kill as many as one in four children as a matter of course, more (between 75-90%) with some strains. Polio would cripple (even in the fifties and sixties, as with Ian Dury) or worse; measles causes brain-damage, hearing loss, infertility or blindness… we don’t vaccinate for nothing. The early vaccinations were far less safe than today’s – inoculating against smallpox, with its 25-75% death rate, cost up to 3-5% of the lives of those inoculated; most believed it a price worth paying, as they were in an age when smallpox, diphtheria, mumps, cholera and other rampant diseases were culling thousands annually.

Today, we are insulated from the awareness of what that was like and it’s easier to spurn healthful treatments. But as More says in his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, ‘I never saw a fool yet that thought himself other than wise’ – this book argues strongly that vaccinations are indeed ‘Your Baby’s Best Shot’ at survival, and I urge every parent and parent-to-be to read it. Spurn the internet, and if you’ve the time and the stomach for it, mine their extensive bibliography of ‘real news’ from people who’ve investigated with the right tools. My one criticism is I’d like to have seen more in the difference between ingesting and injecting tiny amounts of poison (Paracelsus is at the heart of modern medicine, so no-one’s claiming substances aren’t potentially harmful in larger quantities).

Non-vaccination is a luxury when there’s herd immunity, but as the current global measles outbreaks show, the immunity is breaking, and fast.

NOTE FROM THE LITERATURE EDITOR
HIP has published articles on the vaccination debate over recent months in its H & E and Politics Sections along with several resultant letters.
One Flu Over The Top
The Politics Of Influenza
HIP Readers Decry Flu Jab
Further articles examining this debate are planned and letters to HIP welcomed.

Hastings & St Leonards. 15th June – 22nd June

Four booksellers have clubbed together to run a special bookshop week, with a series of events! We are all local independent businesses: Printed Matter Bookshop; Bookbuster; The Bookkeeper Bookshop; and Hare & Hawthorn.

The Bookkeeper Bookshop, on King’s Road, is run by mother and son, Carol and Robert. They sell fiction and non-fiction of as many genres as come their way. Running across the week during their usual opening hours, they are holding an exhibition: WHAT WAS LEFT BEHIND – display of a collection of clippings found in books. 

Printed Matter Bookshop, Queens Road, is run by Lee (former homeless & resettlement worker) and sells all new books and some music. Books vary from fiction, culture, social sciences, feminism and black culture to nature, graphic novels and social history. On Monday 17 June from 6pm JUSTYN BARNES will be giving a talk on his new book IKIGAI: Discover Your Reason for Being – entry is free!

Bookbuster, also on Queen’s Road, run for seven years by Tim, is a remainder and second-hand bookshop. They also sell a few records, cds and dvds, plus greetings cards, many by local artists. They run a monthly poetry event, SHEER POETRY. This month’s is a special Really Independent Bookshop Week edition: the compère is Pete Donohue, and as well as our regulars we have guest spots from the excellent Susan Evans, John D Robinson, and Lucy Brennan Shiels. It will run from 6pm-9pm on Thursday 20 June and entry is £2 per head (with complimentary wine).

Then on Saturday 22 June at 7.30 pm at The Bookkeeper Bookshop RACHEL NEUBURGER REYNOLDS launches her debut novel, DROWNING LESSONS. This is the first of five in the Red Frog Mystery Beach Series. She will be giving a reading, answering any questions, and signing copies too!

Hare & Hawthorn, on George Street, is a bookshop selling fiction and non-fiction for adults and children. They also sell greeting cards and gift wrap, stationery and pens, and have a bindery!

Hastings & St Leonards ‘Really Independent Bookshop Week’, 2019 is running from Saturday June 15th to Saturday June 22nd.  Literary events will be run across the week at four venues – Printed Matter Bookshop; Bookkeeper, Bookbuster and Hare & Hawthorn. Events will range from Bloomsday, Justyn Barnes on Ikigai: Discover Your Reason for Being, an extended Sheer Poetry Special (with Susan Evans, John D Robinson, Lucy Brennan Shiel and The Hastings Ulysses Reading Circle, and more), to Rachel Neuberger’s new book launch. 

• Further details to be announced at bookshops and in HIP 129.

Joinedupwriting 
By Roger McGough
Publisher: Penguin Viking, price £12.99

Reviews by John Cornelius

As Buddy Holly’s life and career were tragically cut short in a plane crash which also killed the pilot, Roger Peterson, and two other stars, Ritchie Valens and ‘the Big Bopper’ Jape Richardson, the last thing you’d expect from a book about him is to have to stop every now and then to laugh out loud. But this is what I found myself doing time after time while perusing Spencer Leigh’s new book. Although the hour by hour, minute by minute countdown of Holly’s last day is dramatic, it occurs only halfway through the book. Also described is a musician who gave it all up to sell insurance against being abducted by aliens in, naturally, Roswell, Texas, and Leigh correctly observes that you’ll never get anywhere with
a song entitled There’s a fungus among us.

“… MUSICAL GENIUS FROM A TEXAN ‘NOWHERE TOWN’…”
Whether he’s describing a West Texas pillow-stuffing competition in Lubbock or some of the musical characters unearthed in this story, Spencer cannot resist a humorous aside. While neatly sidestepping mere facetiousness, he nevertheless reveals a genuine love for his subject. The humour helps this rather oft-repeated tale to leap along with a new spring in its step.

If you already know the Buddy Holly story inside-out, you’ll find much here that you didn’t know (or didn’t know you wanted to know). If you are in the fortunate position of not knowing the story already, you have a treat in store. I can’t think of a better way to become acquainted than to read this book. I hope he’ll do a similar job on Roy Orbison, another musical genius from a Texan ‘nowhere town’ – the improbably named Wink, in his case – whose story offers a feast to tragedy fans, as well as a truly weird looking family.

“…A HIGHLY SENSITISED MAN WHO HAS ENJOYED PERSONAL CONTACT OVER THE YEARS WITH SOME REAL CULTURAL HEAVYWEIGHTS…”
While much contemporary poetry retreats into its own self-conscious, quasi-academic netherworld, glancing furtively over its own shoulder to see what everyone else is doing, producing unreadable irrelevancies in the process, Roger McGough continues to quietly plough his own furrow. A new collection from the long-serving ‘People’s Poet’ is always refreshingly welcome. There are of course examples of the clever, chuckle-inducing puns and wordplay that put him on the map over 50 years ago: two which spring out at you are, The bee, the wasp and the poet and the labyrinthine typographic concrete poem, To be stitched inside a French beret, which recalls the Mouse’s Tale from Alice in Wonderland.

However, generally as the collection progresses, the poems become more profound and thoughtful while retaining the trademark wit: reflections on life and time from the perspective of a highly sensitised man who has enjoyed personal contact over the years with some real cultural heavyweights – Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heeney, not to mention The Beatles (mistyped in the singular in Aubade Mirabilis) and the 1960s explosion of Liverpudlian talent in which Roger and his group, Scaffold, played a not insignificant role.

As this reviewer was born in North Liverpool, as were both Spencer Leigh and Roger McGough, I can hear cries of ‘croneyism!’ for giving each a good press. But can I help it if our finest rock historian and archivist as well as our wisest and wittiest poet both happen to be scousers? No. If I’m pushed to pour at least some vinegar on the chips, I will say that what these books have in common is a sparse, uninspired jacket design. McGough admits he had trouble persuading his publisher to join up the words in joinedupwriting – a difficult concept for the IT trained generation, no doubt.

As for Spencer Leigh, in his youth he looked a lot like Buddy Holly, complete with the big black glasses. In fact, come to think of it, you never saw the two of them together in the same room…

• John Cornelius is author of Liverpool 8, a well-received social history of this famous area in words and sketches, along with two poetry collections Combing My Hair For The Hangman and Living In The Mystery. A third collection, Heading for the Sea, is in preparation.

I started writing seriously over 25 years ago. Oh, I had always been a bit of a scribbler but most of it wound up in the waste paper basket, so I thought it was time to give it a proper go. I didn’t go to university; in fact I barely finished primary school before I was working in the local porridge factory. Not that further education would have made me a writer; good writers are born, not made, as far as I can see. Would going to university have made Brendan Behan a writer? Or Sean O’Casey? Or Patrick Kavanagh? They had writing in their blood; that’s what made them writers. And I suspect that is true of most writers. And it certainly is true for me; my first play, Money from America, broke box office records at the Tabard Theatre in West London and had patrons lining up around the block to see it.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
I grew up in Ballyhussa, Co. Waterford, Ireland and I guess we were poor. No running water, no electricity, no toilets, no TV, no car…you name it we didn’t have it. But then, money wasn’t as important as it is nowadays. If you had enough to live on you were doing well…Even the poorest cottage had half an acre of land attached, and enough spuds, cabbage and other vegetables could be grown to keep a family from the poorhouse.

But I had a happy childhood, not a bit like the miserable one that Frank McCourt wrote about in Angela’s Ashes. So the desire to leave Ireland and move to England had no bearing on my formative years. I left Ireland because of the wanderlust – we Irish are a migratory people by nature – and because of the belief that the grass is always greener over the hill. Mostly mistaken, I can now confirm!

They say you can never go back. And you can’t. Not really. Oh, I return and visit for holidays and to see my relations occasionally, but the Ireland I grew up in no longer exists. And neither does the boy I was growing up there.

CRICKLEWOOD COWBOYS
Having spent most of my working life in the construction industry, both in Ireland and England, first as a welder and later as a carpenter, there was no shortage of story ideas for me in this field. And my book/play, Cricklewood Cowboys, focuses on various Irish characters working for ‘subbies’, or subcontractors, operating in the Kilburn/Cricklewood/Camden Town area of London. This was the sleazy side of the construction industry, where ‘subbies’ hired labourers on a daily basis for cash-in-hand and no questions asked. The venues were usually Irish pubs such as The Crown in Cricklewood or The Nags Head in Camden Town. Initially, these payments were in cash but then cheques began to make an appearance. Trouble was most of these men didn’t have bank accounts, so the Irish pubs would cash these cheques – usually for a fee. As these pubs were often owned by the ‘subbies’ themselves they were onto a good thing. Not only did they get paid for cashing their own cheques but most of the money was spent over the counters on drink as well!

When writing I work in a small, rather ‘claustrophobic’ room which I call my den. If it was big and airy and too comfortable I might be tempted to do nothing at all!  I write both novels and plays, and I suppose there is a difference between the two. I guess “Books are about thoughts, plays are about words,” is as good a way as any of describing the difference. You need much more stamina for a book – which is why I see myself more as a playwright than a novelist. You can’t sit there waiting for inspiration to come but that blank page can be mesmerising at times. The longer you stare at it, the less inclined the words are to appear.  I have borrowed a tactic from an author whom I greatly admire – Ernest Hemingway.  Papa always left a piece of his previous day’s work unfinished so that he had something to begin the new day with. I try to do that as much as possible myself.

DOWN BOTTLE ALLEY
These days my home is in Hastings. My wife Margaret and I moved here in 2000, and at present have no desire to return to the rat race that is London. Many of my plays have been written here, including Down Bottle Alley, which I adapted from a book by a local writer and alcoholic, Brian Harding.  Brian had been a drinker from an early age, had spent a lot of time as a vagrant alcoholic, frequenting Bottle Alley for many years, yet despite his alcoholism had managed to write a brilliant book about it called My Wretched Alcoholism – This Damn Puppeteer. The play was performed with great success at The White Rock Theatre and several other venues in Hastings, as well as in London. 

Here is what one critic said about it;  ‘What followed was…a play so brutally honest, so visually vivid and so terrifyingly real that there could be no hiding away from it…throughout the whole performance you could hear a pin drop’.

• Tom O’Brien’s books are available at Bookbuster, Queens Road, Hastings – please support local independent bookshops. If you can’t get to Hastings then find his work on Amazon. Tom’s website:  www.gorgeousgael.com 

REVIEW BY LEE HUMPHRIES

The title suggests a how to guide for wanna-be corporations looking to gain easy access to parts of our NHS – and, in essence, that is what has already happened, so this is speaking retrospectively. We start with the turning of our NHS into an ‘internal market’, firstly dividing the NHS up into Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and NHS hospitals trusts. Under John Major, PCTs became the purchasers of services, and NHS hospital trusts became the providers of services, and thus hospitals had to start competing with each other as we were told that the public sector was far too inefficient, and that the private sector brings innovation and cost saving measures.

This public-private partnership continued as Tony Blair, despite pledging to abolish the internal market within our NHS, went even further with New Labour’s ‘NHS Plan 2000’ and ‘NHS Improvement Plan 2005’. Both Plans brought more privatisation and saw more services offered out to tender – for example, an MRI scan would sometimes be carried out by a private operator, who would then bill the NHS. Those services which were outsourced were still allowed to use the NHS logo, so giving the illusion that treatment was being carried out by the NHS.

New Labour adopted John Major’s Private Finance Initiative schemes (PFI’s), using them to build roads, prisons, schools and of course, hospitals. The message once again given out was that schools and hospitals were badly run-down due to being in public-sector hands. So the projects were tendered out – to bankers, construction firms, and other assorted management consortia (the PFI model was later exported globally). Instead of borrowing money from central government at zero/low interest, these loans for PFI constructions were borrowed at high interest rates with high charges for repair and maintenance costs. These high costs went on to bankrupt some hospitals, or forced them to lay off staff, reduce services, merge with other hospitals, or close down completely and sell off the NHS land.

Dr El-Gingihy is a GP who trained at the Royal London Hospital, which is part of Barts Health Trust. He writes: “This is the largest trust in the country and accordingly has the most expensive PFI scheme, which is one of Innisfree’s flagship projects. Innisfree – a fund management company in the City of London – is one of the biggest players in the PFI market”.

The great big sell-off of our NHS is has been finessed by dividing it into two further categories: Primary Care (GP and other Community Services), and Secondary Care (our hospitals). Whilst reading this book you will come across dozens of acronyms and the easiest way to view these is to understand them all as a way of deliberately obfuscating and basically carving up and selling off more and more of our NHS. Primary Care became a way of buying in services such as GPs, medical examiners etc. from outside companies – through private firms such as United Health, Atos, Virgin, Serco, G4S, Harmoni, Take Care Now (I kid you not) – including many of the Out of Hours services.

From 2003, Foundation Trusts were set up so our hospitals could act as semi-independent businesses allowing them financial and other freedoms. Time and again the likes of Serco, Harmoni and Take Care Now
had been falsifying data and overcharging for services provided. Polyclinics emerged as a way of combining services with Primary Care, such as mental health, maternity care, diagnostics and more – however, they are all inextricably linked to private finance, have become very expensive to run, and are running into financial trouble.

All of this privatisation would not have been possible without the revolving door of health ministers with links to the private sector. Alan Milburn went on to become an advisor for Bridgepoint Capital; Andrew Langlsey went on to advise pharmaceutical giant Roche and others; Patrica Hewitt went on to advise a private equity firm, Cinvern, which bought 25 of Bupa’s hospitals, and then became a special consultant to Alliance Boots… Over 200 parliamentarians have had recent financial links to private healthcare providers.

To make privatisation easy, you would need to run a smear campaign against our NHS. In the wise words of Noam Chomsky, “That’s the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital”. The smear campaign has been running for decades saying that public healthcare is too expensive, services are inadequate, the public sector is too inefficient, so best to hand it over to private capital for efficiency and competitiveness. Dr El-Gingihy demonstrates that our NHS is in fact the least expensive and one of the best in the world, and the envy of the world. It’s the deliberate under-funding and unnecessary debts that have been its biggest burden.

Another step: legislating to dismantle our NHS. After a 2010 Conservative manifesto stopping a top-down reorganisation of our NHS, stating “the NHS is safe in our hands”, the Conservatives went into coalition with the Liberal Democrats and imposed ‘The Health & Social Care Act’. This piece of legislation has been described as the “biggest act of privatisation ever seen in our NHS”.

To plot against our NHS is step seven in this book. The plotting has been going on since the early 1980s where a Central Policy Review drew up plans to bring in an insurance-based health service, whereby the bulk of medical facilities would be privately owned and run, and those who need it would pay for it as in the USA.

Step eight is to help brew the perfect storm to make all this happen. Never let a good crisis go to waste: and the financial crisis of 2008 was perfectly timed to bring in austerity measures. Those measures have allowed maternity ward closures, walk-in centre closures, GP surgery closures, A&E closures, recommendations of axing 10% of the NHS workforce – 135,000 jobs. We’ve seen ward closures, a 50% cut of district & community nurses since 2010, and one in five hospitals threatened with closure and the land sold off.

Step nine? Redesign the workforce. Between 2015-2016 junior doctors took part in demonstrations to oppose the imposition of plans to remove safeguards from working excessive hours, reducing their pay, increasing their hours, and punishing them for taking time off work – mostly aimed at women. This unrest enabled the government and certain parts of the media to demonise the doctors claiming they were putting the public’s health at risk.

Last but not least, step ten is the introduction of US-style healthcare in the UK. As the chapter heading suggests, this has been on the agenda since 1982 and is now being put into practice. The profitable parts of our NHS have been handed over to private companies during these years – and still are – whilst the non-profitable bits will be met by the public purse.

The afterword by the author says all of this is reversible but it needs the political will. More people need to know this is all going on: awareness of this wholesale privatisation should be imperative, whatever your political persuasion, if we want to save our NHS – after all, we’ve paid for it (and continue to do so) with our National Insurance contributions, as have our parents and grandparents.

• There is a website, www.999callfornhs.org.uk, if you want to find out more, and on April 26th the Electric Palace is showing a film, ‘The Great NHS Heist’.

• Available from Bookbusters, Queens Road & Printed Matter Books, Queens Road.

Review by Tim Barton

Towns and cities across the world are suffering an on-going assault on their diverse systems, and need that diversity to be resilient as much as the ecosystems of the ‘natural world’ do. The arbitrary division of the human lived environment from ‘nature’ is not only illusory and false but very dangerous. ‘Neo-liberal’ capitalist economics are worsening conditions for cities and nature, with corporate greed, the privatising of public space, and rising inequality damaging the sustainability of our cities along with that of the ecosphere.

Chatterton’s book seeks to provide a ‘manifesto for real change’, in order to aid our addressing the urban aspects of this accelerating apocalypse.

The author is aware of the limits and partiality of a shortish book so rather than seeking comprehensiveness, focusses on four specific areas. In the introduction he explains his choices and their interconnectedness. The first two are ‘the car-free city’ and ‘the post-carbon city’. His case studies for progressive action come from all over the world:  for example, in looking at models for the car-free city, he picks out places already running ‘car-free days’ – cities as varied as Bath, Reykjavik, La Rochelle and Bogota, all with a strong car-free movement. The already global ‘reclaim the city’ movement is discussed along with India’s increasingly popular ‘Raahgiri Day’, begun in Gurgaon but becoming more widespread (especially powerfully in Delhi). This broad approach is the pattern throughout the other chapters.

Post-carbon ideas have remarkably high traction in America – from a UK perspective, we see the USA as presented via top-level Washington (plus New York, and LA) politics. But as a country composed of federated States with powerful State Governors and City Mayors, urban areas throughout the country are adopting restrictions on industrial emissions despite the position taken in the White House (and have been for far longer than Trump has been president). The kind of local autonomy required to achieve this is not always available, and the UK seems especially ham-strung in this regard.

His ‘Bio City’ chapter deliberately conflates the urban-synthetic world and the natural world within which it is inextricably embedded. Restoration and regeneration of badly degraded air, water, and land ecosystems is embraced as a key ingredient in making where we live sustainable. One locally relevant element to greening our cities is, of course, eco-energy. Right now, the council is looking at plans for a solar farm in the country park. Obviously, for a post-carbon green future such schemes are important. However, the fine detail, around who owns it, what the output is, how it’s costed, where it’s placed etc. dictates the usefulness and viability of such projects. The park site has an output significantly limited by its infrastructural position relative to the National Grid; its costings appear to be wholly deluded; and the benefit for the community zero – as the local Green Party suggest in the ‘climate emergency’ letter, addressed to Hastings Council: We should see plans that ‘Work with local community energy providers to cover the towns roofs with solar panels, combined in a smart grid that could provide cheaper energy for all local people.’

The key area Chatterton concentrates on that brings the issues together, where our green Davids can face-off against the Goliaths of political inertia, corporate hierarchies and economic raiders is ‘the Common City’. He envisions, first, the current dominant ideology which he tags as ‘the Uncommon City’ (it is of course the ubiquitous city, but he means ‘common’/
’uncommon’ in the context of ‘the commons’ – publicly accessible spaces and resources) concentrating especially upon the neo-liberal city.

So, the agenda is to reclaim the urban commons, pursue ‘people powered’ housing, plan and enforce smaller-scale locally owned development, et cetera. He looks at various local and complementary currency schemes and, most importantly perhaps, ideas for redemocratising city and town politics. Citizens are not just passive inhabitants but engaged and empowered collectives and individuals. To achieve this requires us to, for example, embrace citizens’ assemblies (directly democratic decision-making forums that could exist alongside town councils, but ultimately should seek to replace them); to break the back of dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrats; and to place long-term stability over short-term financial gain.

• Unlocking Sustainable Cities is available from Bookbusters, Queens Road & Printed Matter Books, Queens Road.

Chris Connelley  feels the love with a heart- warming tale of everyday folk fighting against all odds

Avid readers of this column may recall a review of Mel Wright’s previous novel, You Can Save Me, which detailed the lives and loves of a mainly middle-aged set of friends trying to eke out something approaching a living in austerity-era Hastings. The storyline centred around the ultimately doomed efforts of one of them, the enterprising rogue Leo, to set up a new business selling goods close to their sell-by-date to people without much money, providing a narrative vehicle to expose the increasingly fragile existence experienced by some at the fag-end of the ‘baby boomer’ generation. Having ‘never had it so good’ in their youth, they reap a less munificent autumn of their days as they stumble towards delayed and often diminished pensions.

The depth of the recession may be long past, but Wright’s cast of coastal irregulars continue to experience the icy blast of precariat insecurity in his latest outing, Roundabout, the third and final part of his Hastings trilogy. Times change, but the dominant themes are enduring, touching upon ageing, friendship, love, loss, survival and identity.

Former good time girl, Abbie, now a full-time carer for once formidable, but now frail Millie, brings to life the isolation, heartache and sense of loss that so often accompanies this role. Her bleak situation is exacerbated by a falling out with her best friend Rita, who, though liberated from the shackles of an exploitative marriage, struggles to maintain her economic self-worth in the cut-throat world of zero- hours contract cleaning. Rita also confronts a fractured relationship with Geordie auto didact, Bill, who, torn between the call of his family in Newcastle and the impossibility of securing decent work ‘down south’, ponders a permanent return to his roots. Even Leo, newly reinvented as an antiques dealer in the Old Town, and with a fashionable new lover in tow, suffers a knock-back significant enough to challenge his instinct for effortless survival.

All of which may suggest Roundabout is a rather grim read, a kind of literary ‘I, Daniel Blake’, the poverty-porn smash-hit movie currently wowing the right-on chattering classes at art house cinemas across the nation. Mercifully, nothing could be further from the truth. Wright writes with warmth, honesty and good humour, deploying his considerable gift for writing conversation to conjure up a recognisable world that is a million miles away from the narrow confines of so much contemporary fiction, defined by just a few fashionable North and West London postcodes. Rather, he occupies a space that is closer to the social realist fiction of the post-war years, or even top of the range soap writing from the golden age of ‘Coronation Street’, where identifiable characters, usually female, drove important topical storylines without succumbing to preachiness.

I devoured Roundabout in just a couple of sittings, and, ultimate compliment this, finished craving much more. Specifically, I want to know if there is more life in the old dog Leo, whether new romances continue to blossom and if, and how, the changes happening in and around Hastings, currently attracting so much media interest as a regeneration hotspot, impact the lives of characters like these.

With Christmas coming, have no doubt. This feel-good page-turner is an affordable stocking filler for anyone who enjoys a good story, loves spotting local venues and who fancies an hour or so away from an excess of escapist candy-coated festive revelry. Go buy it now!

Roundabout by Mel Wright

Deptford Forum Publishing, RRP £6.99, available at Bookbuster for £4.99

By Roy Browning with illustrations by Mike Raxworthy

reviewed by Pete Donohue

When Phil and Ann Gill turned up with a typewritten poem at local illustrator Mike Raxworthy’s studio he didn’t realise he was about to agree to do a marathon amount of illustrations and turn it into a children’s book. Ann told him that her 94-year old father had written it some years back for his grandchildren, and, as Christmas was coming up, she thought it would be a good idea if it could get made into a little book as a present for him.

“She asked me how much I would charge to do some illustrations,” says Mike today. “I liked the poem and thought I could do about 6 illustrations in black and white quite quickly. After all it was just a one-off for her Dad!” A couple of good bottles of red wine were agreed as a fee.

But when Mike got down to dividing up each verse he found himself producing 14 drawings – one opposite each verse. Phil and Ann loved the black and white drawings and asked for colour versions. Mike did one a day until the job was complete.

“I made it into an A5 size book, producing it in spreads,” Mike told HIP, “and by the time I’d put it together with a cover and inside title page it had become a 36-page book.”

Phil immediately delivered a box of red wine to Mike and announced he was going to self-publish it and print a few hundred copies. Within the next week he’d bought a barcode, and Mike and Ann’s dad, Roy Browning, formed a small publishing company.

The Christmas Tree is available at Bookbuster, in Queens Road; Hare and Hawthorn, in West Street, Hastings Old Town; and Hastings Tourist Information Centre, on the seafront for £4.99.

Dream Brother the lives & music
of Jeff & Tim Buckley By David Browne

Fourth Estate, RRP £9.99, available at Bookbuster for £3.50

Review by Tim Barton

Both Jeff and his father, Tim, were aware of ‘alcoholism, violence, and general weirdness in [their] lineage’, with, for Jeff at least, a side order of abandonment and death. Both had ‘father figure’ issues throughout their lives; both expressed these through embracing then rejecting such figures as they appeared in their lives; both made transcendent music.  Both died young.

It is, then, unsurprising that an elegiac and fateful aura surrounds them both. All lyrics, all conversations with friends, find subjects, across a wide range. Which to focus on, though? In the ‘doomed and entangled’ camp some see threads of meaning at the time, though most pull meaning selectively through some romantic drive to understand after the event. Both Buckleys said and sang enough that can be given a mystical spin – whether that narrative is ‘the truth’ or not is for each of us alone to decide.

Browne, at some points, rejects too fatalist an interpretation but nevertheless his framing narrative, perhaps inevitably, succumbs to exactly such an approach. Just some of the nuggets available, to use as a prism to extract such portentous meaning, follow:

‘Jeff wrote about “transition and reincarnation and becoming molecules in rain.”’; he penned a song for the unfinished second studio album, Murder Suicide Meteor Slave; one of his lyrics (a clear paraphrase of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Your Time Is Gone Come’) reads ‘One of these days and it won’t be long / Call my name and I’ll be gone’; another journal entry – ‘I prepared my entire life to face the future unprepared to face the future. I hope my brain splits open and that my guts blow out either side of my body. I hope my eyes are open when I die so they can see you for the final breath. I hope that I never come back alive.’ There are many more references to death, pain, suicide…

Many of Tim’s lyrics were penned by Larry Beckett, but nevertheless, there is ample fruit for the fatalist doomsters in his cupboard, too: I pick only one here. Check this, from a letter to friend and erstwhile band member, Lee Underwood: ‘You are what you are, you know what you know, and there are no words for loneliness, black, bitter, aching loneliness, that gnaws the roots of silence in the night, […] and we are lying there, blind atoms in our cellar depths, gray voiceless atoms in the manswarm desolation of the earth, and our fame is lost, our names forgotten, our powers are wasting from us like mined earth while we lie here at evening and the river flows… and the dark time is feeding like a vulture on our entrails, and we know that we are lost, and cannot stir’. Of special importance for the mystique is the reference there to the river. And, too, this lyric (actually Beckett’s, I think): ‘Should I stand amid the breakers? / Or should I lie with death my bride?’ … Later, long after Tim had died of an overdose, Jeff, a few years older than his father had been, drowned in a tributary of the Mississippi – his body was found, days later, washed up near Beale Street, Memphis.

This latter leads me to the more interesting accounts of Tim and Jeff’s intriguingly entangled biographies and musical gifts – Beale Street is one of the music Meccas of Memphis. Indeed, let’s put to retire, for now, Jeff’s ‘subconscious suicidal impulse’ with this harangue (oops, tellingly ambivalent, perhaps we are retiring Fate too early?) regarding Tim, from a 1990 letter, never sent: ‘It was only a mistake he made, it was no murder, it was no real suicide, it’s only that Tim’s momentum had been going all that time on “I’m-gonna-die-no-matter-what”, that the dumbest message in the world had become a subconscious language from so much practice.’

And really, this book is about the Music; about the Talent; about the Biz. Any greenhorn wannabe musician (Hastings is chock full of ‘em) can learn a great deal, vicariously, from highs and lows and tragedies of the Dream Brothers. Both immersed themselves totally in newly discovered music, mainstream and weird. Jeff expresses it in relation to one band he toured with, ‘They destroyed me in a really beautiful way’. Of Tim’s magnum opus, a commercially unsuccessful album, gorgeous and transcendent, Jeff says ‘…Star sailor wasn’t a failure. It was an untouchable beauty’.

Not only is this a powerful and detailed book on the careers and lives of these artists, it is also imbued with the poetry of the music. Both Tim and Jeff were powerful artists and their music speaks for itself. I immersed myself in it whilst reading Dream Brother – I suggest you do too. And ignore Browne’s dour view of Sefronia, it is a beautiful album.

Both father and son had high range expressive voices, and loved to experiment, each in their own way. Columbia A&R man, Steve Berkowitz, says ‘He wanted to do what he wanted to do’, and, applicable to Tim as well, of course, describing the self-destructive approach both took to authority, ‘Maybe it was being provincial, maybe it was fear’. In a letter, Jeff complained ‘those studio cats make me want to EAT FLESH, they ruin so much good stuff, sometimes I don’t love the music. I only have a certain respect for it right now’. The first part of that was an attack on his father’s producer, Joe Falsia, regarding the final and generally abhorred album, Look at
the Fool. I am sure Tim felt the same, and the last part of the quote makes it very clear that Jeff was talking as much of his own battles with Sony as Tim’s (who was on Warner sub-label, Frank Zappa’s Discreet).

Indeed, to finish properly Jeff’s letter of 1990, on the ‘dumbest message’: ‘[…] I just think he had the whole thing backwards on purpose so that, somehow, he could make sure he was protected from the enemy.’ The enemy was one they shared, commercialism drives corporate agendas, tolerance for ‘real music’ is low. On the last of Jeff’s Australian tour dates he bursts out an expression of the existential angst auteurs may feel when pressured to produce pop: ‘Despite all my rage I’m just a rat in a cage. Go figure.’

Go figure…