We gotta get out of this place...

It was 1965. The Animals.

We gotta get out of this place
If it's the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place
'Cause girl, there's a better life for me and you

These are the words which became the theme song of the Vietnam War and are burnt into my brain.

Every time I get away for a break, note - not a positive thing like a “make” but a break, a destruction of something that works I resolve it’ll be the first of many. Never is. 

This one’s hardly a summer holiday. We’ve already had one of those but as I recall – a rather fuzzy memory -  I had Covid and spent most of the time asleep. No, this is a retreat to a quiet apartment overlooking a nature reserve and a stream.

In Canterbury for glorious choral music, Elizabethan architecture, lazy lunches and bison. Virtually extinct in Europe and pretty well unknown in Britain these creatures, the heaviest living wild land animals, are like powerful demolition machines. In a rewilding experiment  at Wilder Blean in Kent they are turning jungles into parks. And a baby bison has just been born so things are looking up.

And everyone else seems at it too. Good friends have just returned from a brilliant trip to and around India. It’s strange that when I was there a few years ago it seemed somehow familiar as though I’d lived there in a previous existence. It smelt wonderful and mysterious and was exciting in a way China, although fascinating too, somehow wasn’t. Poetry as opposed to prose.

And our daughter, son in law and grandchildren are in New York doing what we all do in the most thrilling city in the world. Walking. Walking. Walking. Walking through diversity. Chinatown. Harlem. The Financial District. Brownstone buildings. Central Park. The High Line. The Staten Ferry. Broadway diners where resting artists are now waitresses who suddenly burst into song. The biggest burgers ever. Whale sized Lobsters. And Walking. Walking. Walking.

What we missed through the drab days of lockdown was travel, experiences and change. In those same as, same as days of imprisonment that sixth sense of discovery and change was turned off which was tragic because ultimately it’s that sense which we need and which turns us on when we get weary.

So we are getting away because there’s a better life than Brighton great as Brighton is. But right now it feels like this dirty old part of the city where the sun refused to shine. Living in Brighton is like a never ending dish of scampi. Delicious but occasionally I need steak or – can this be me – tofu. 

I’m looking forward to rediscovering deep sleep and getting rid of mental cobwebs. I’m also looking forward to learning a few new things – I don’t know what yet but when I find out I’ll be sure to tell you.

Have a great week. Have fun. Plan your next adventure.

WE'RE NO LONGER GOLDEN

Last week I spotted a piece in the Washington Post, a worldwide poll which indicated a growing disenchantment with democracy as an effective form of government. The negative response was more pronounced amongst millennials than any other age cohort.  There was also a rising  preference for strong leadership instead of elections. It was slight in the UK, pronounced in Germany and strong in Spain, South Africa and Russia.

This is surprising given a conversation I’d been having a few days earlier about how in my youth in the 1960s  there’d been a global rebellion against the establishment. From the music revolution in the UK to the Paris riots to Woodstock to the Washington anti- Vietnam War protests in Washington to the more extreme Baader-Meinhof terrorists in Germany. Millennials were seemingly all into free love, flower power and revolution.

The words of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” linger in my mind recalling that  world which was finding its voice and swinging leftwards:

“We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden” 

We believed we were golden as the old order crumbled. 

(All shades of red above and getting redder as authoritarianism strengthens.)

Like it or not we’ve recently been swinging towards totalitarianism

Trump is not an aberration. He’s a sign of the times and of things to come. There are reactions of course like BLM and environmental activists like Greta Thunberg but they are ultimately being drowned out. People are frightened and when that happens they veer right. They’re frightened that things seem out of control. 

The second conversation was with someone who’s lived and worked in China for 20 years. He described a country where Covid is now over (no more face masks) and where the economy is booming.  The rules to contain the pandemic were and are still rigorous. Anyone – Chinese or foreign -  entering the country or returning to the country is quarantined for two weeks, isolated in a hotel room near the airport…quite a nice hotel but, nonetheless, a prison. In China no one breaks out of their bio-secure bubble; everyone obeys the guidelines and the law. One shudders to imagine how the Chinese authorities would have treated those rugby players, the  Barbarians’ twelve, who evaded their security guards to have dinner together at an Italian Restaurant on Thursday night breaking the Covid code of conduct to which they’d agreed. 

It’s behaviour like that that inspires so many people to say they want a more strict enforcement of rules and a more widespread lockdown.

China is a country without compromise when it comes to law enforcement and although the liberal in me shrinks it’s seemed to work. Interestingly within China there seems to be a widespread acknowledgement that they’d “been eating the US lunch for years” and that the election of Donald Trump was of a US President that China deserved.

But look at China today and you see the second biggest global economy emerging relatively unscathed from the pandemic that’s wrecked the rest of the global economy.

(Jan. 2019 – Aug. 2020)

China unlike most other nations has a long term strategy to achieve stability and growth. They seem intent on avoiding unnecessary trouble. When I asked about Hong Kong my friend looked puzzled – “well that’s all over now. China is in charge. Stability is the winner once again.”

How curious to regard China as a role model. We don’t want to know about what happens to those who step out of line. So much has happened that we want to ignore like Tiananmen Square massacre in the past, like the repression of the Uighurs now. But  the fact that China has 61 self-made women billionaires  (2/3 of all those in the world) and that they have a new generation of aspiring, linguistically adept and smart young people is rather impressive.

Many are wondering if “benevolent” dictatorship works. “Benevolent”? Just let me think about that.