Windy City

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Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips.  Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power.  With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done.  An enormous silence hung over the whole building.  Outside, there was a clear blue sky.

Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong.  The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead.  Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack.  No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.

People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity.  Everywhere there were scenes of destruction:  huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road.  Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement.  People milled around, some taking photographs.  There were no trains and few buses.  An occasional ambulance flashed by.

On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said.  And the radio itself was strangely different.  Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes.  The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped.  Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee.  A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave.  It felt like the end of the world.

It was the Great Wind of '87.  'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'.  The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature.  Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable.  But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable.  A case of presque-vu.

For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London.  No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power.  Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently.  Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.

Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death.  After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave.  That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable.  In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze.  Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?

(1987)

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Pravda

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During the interval of Hare and Brenton's 'Pravda' we went out onto the terrace of the National Theatre.  As we drank, we noticed a shimmering in the sky above the Thames directly in front of the building.  "Probably a UFO" we said jokingly, passing back inside to the comforting lights.

When we came out at the end, and walked to the car parked on Waterloo Bridge, we saw not one but two illuminated shapes, both hovering over Somerset House, but at different heights.  Along the bridge, clumps of people were gathered, staring up at the sky.  Passing cars would occasionally slow, winding down their windows to get a better view.  There could be no doubt about the phenomenon's reality.

It was a perfectly clear night: the stars were everywhere visible.  There was no sound on the breeze, so helicopters were ruled out.  Airships had been a common sight that year, but this vague, watery light looked nothing like that.  They were too high for flags or other objects tethered by a rope - and one had just moved even higher.

On closer examination they had the appearance of slowly pulsating or rotating objects.  Sometimes patterns like figures of eight would appear.  Mostly, though, the effect was constantly changing and indescribable.  After a while, we went home, but soon returned, drawn back despite ourselves.  Now there was only one light, much higher.  Shortly afterwards it moved south across the sky.  It seemed very slow; and yet in a few seconds it had disappeared over the horizon.  It was a warm autumn evening but gradually a chill spread down our spines.

Ten thousand years of civilisation and rather fewer of rationalism told us that there had to be a sensible explanation.  Most of the bystanders seemed able to accommodate the sight in their mental universe without difficulty.  Try as I might, I could not share their equanimity.

Yet the alternative to glib acceptance was almost too terrible to name.  UFOs lie so far outside the range of normal experience that they have been banished from serious discourse.  People have been marginalised and branded mad just for countenancing the idea.  Perhaps this is only natural: the implications of visitors from another planetary system would be such as to undercut every treasured assumption of ordinary life.

For example: if they had succeeded in making such a journey, their technology would be unimaginably more advanced than ours.  Demonstrably losing our place as the acme of the universe would be a blow to our sense of self unmatched since Kepler, or Darwin.  Moreover, galactic serfdom - in much the same way as the West has visited and vanquished the Third World - would have to be a strong possibility.

Standing on the bridge was like teetering on the brink of an absurd yet terrifying sci-fi film.  But nothing happened, neither that night or the next day.  There were no announcements, no news.  Everybody went on as normal.  And yet for me those events remained as true as they were inexplicable.

(1986)

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Colonising names

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In all taxonomies there is a tension between brevity and limpidity.  At one end of the scale you could simply number every object in a class, a compact but unhelpful approach.  At the other end, you could attach a full, descriptive name, which aids understanding but negates classification's purpose, concision.

One problem common to all labelling systems is coping with the addition of new members.  As more and more are added, so the labelling must become more complex to encompass them.  A case in point is the allocation of telephone numbers.  Demand in London became so great that the capital was split into an inner and outer zone, with respective prefixes 071 and 081 replacing the old 01 code.  An alternative would have been to add an extra digit to every telephone number in the country, preserving London's single 01 prefix.  As usual, people have opted for the easier, though less logical, implementation.

The same growth in complexity has occurred with personal names.  Look at any long list of past incumbents in an ancient parish church, and it is striking how the names start off simply, perhaps just a Hugh or a Peter, and gradually blossom into John of Wykeham, before becoming full-blown first names and surnames.  Today we find that process taken even further, with middle names a crucial distinguishing factor in certain circumstances, especially bureaucratic ones.

Our hankering after older, simpler schemes manifests itself in social situations.  If we know someone well enough, we tend to think of them by their first name;  any confusion between similarly-named people is usually resolved by context.  This works well enough for business and casual acquaintances, but with names of our dearly beloved it is not so simple.

The closer we get to someone, the more we imbue their name with our feelings for them.  It is perhaps significant that we address our parents not by name, but call them instead by neutral descriptions - 'mother' and 'father'.  Given the strength of this emotional attachment we would probably find it impossible ever to apply their names to anyone else: in effect, that name would become our personal word for 'mother'.

But we have no such linguistic buffer with friends and lovers.  If we know John very well, or love Jane to madness, our reactions to those with the same name will never again be normal: the burden of the past, called up by that incantatory set of sounds, will obtrude between us and the person.  Similarly, once we have hated a Jim, we will find ourselves uncomfortably constrained in the presence of a new, quite blameless Jim.

It is as if each name can carry only one experience for us: once charged, it is used up, set, a mental landmark we must live with and move around.  The people we know and love circumscribe our future acts and relations: we may rebuff the perfect mate for her wrong name, or find ourselves unable to christen our child as we wish without making him a revenant.  In a world of colonised names, we wander poor and dispossessed.  Perhaps it would be easier if we were called by our telephone numbers.

(1989)

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