We're still burning Catholics

Only a few of our national rituals continue to escape the clutches of the PR industry and avoid political correctness. For example, since 1606 we have celebrated the death of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic in a Protestant country, who was discovered beneath the Palace of Westminster shortly before the opening of Parliament on 5 November, surrounded by barrels full of gunpowder. He was arrested, tortured and executed, in that order.

Of course we celebrate the man’s death – not his pragmatism, his enterprise, his derring-do, his chutzpah or his sense of proportion. And how do we do this?

We spend weeks building enormous bonfires, and construct, from old clothes, straw etc, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, known as a guy. As children, we stand on street corners with our guy slumped beside us hustling for money (“penny for the guy”, we bleat at returning commuters).

(Introduced to begging at such a young age we turn into soulless bastards later on, kicking our vagrants, shunning our bag-ladies and refusing to buy The Big Issue. We may still give a penny for the guy though – we were young once.)

We buy loads of fireworks, and bake parkin (a sort of ginger cake), make bonfire toffee (with black treacle) and soup.

On 5 November we put our guy on top of our pile of wood, spray the whole thing with petrol and set it alight, then stand around, consuming our bizarre refreshments. We might go so far as mulled wine, but we will certainly throw potatoes into the holocaust, ostensibly to bake them. Of course they are never seen again (and neither are any scruffy small people who look like guys).

We watch our guys engulfed by the flames. Young children have become emotionally attached to their guys over the weeks of course and the whole business becomes charged with despair as these cuddly effigies, wearing their cast-offs, burn horribly before their eyes.

We let off our fireworks, some of which are unpredictable, since you can get caught out by advances in firework design. In the old days you’d always launch your skyrockets by poking the stick in an empty milk bottle and lighting the blue touch-paper. Nowadays this is likely to result in high-velocity shards of glass taking everyone’s legs off at boot level, while the rocket fizzes round your garden, bouncing off fences, beer mugs, pets, neighbours and so on before exploding in the greenhouse.

We finally get the garden hose out when the flames have caught the fruit trees and almost reached the kitchen window.

The following day it’s cool to ask people how the injuries went at their bonfire, while the media feasts on mutilation horror stories and calls for fireworks to be banned from public sale. And then we forget the whole thing, as we become preoccupied with complaining about Christmas.

Interestingly, although this is a major national event, there are no dedicated greetings cards (except the Get Well Soon designs which become necessary on 6^th November).

So anyway, Merry Bonfire Night.

No laughing matter

The season just ended, and trout men have come up out of the river, shaking a summer's worth of twigs, flies and dead bats from our obnoxious headgear. We've trudged back across the fields, our minds elsewhere. We've found our cars, gone to the pub and sneaked back home in the dark to re-acclimatise.

We’ve stacked the rods, hung up the waders, emptied the beer bottles from our bags, filed our catch returns and stared malevolently at our forthcoming calendar.

Eventually, regrettably, our attention has been forced to focus on what you have been making of things while we were otherwise engaged.

You have not shaped up. Your concentration has obviously wandered and our world does not appear to have improved. On the contrary, we've got asymmetric political debate in Burma, another inquest into Princess Diana’s death, the first run on a British bank since the 19^th century and the emergence of the Clinton Cackle as the archetype political laugh.

Politicians don’t have a sense of humour on the whole. Whatever it is in their genes that makes them want to swan about being important and pretending to run things for us, also snips the laughter muscles and by-passes the humour circuitry.

It is their deeds rather than their wit that make us laugh. So, when someone tells you they’re all about substance, not spin, and then hires spin doctors to promote this calumny at every opportunity then you know you’re dealing with a politician – in this case Gordon Brown, ersatz prime minister of the UK.

The advertising campaign designed to make us like the man had a photo of him (dangerous for anyone with a face like a car wreck) and the words “Not Flash. Just Gordon”. At first I thought it was some crazed gin advertisement, and anyway, while I can remember who Flash Gordon is (or will be – he must have been set in the future), I can’t believe he means much to anyone younger than 40. After all, he was all the rage in 1934.

To avoid politicians and retain a sense of disproportion, chalkstream fly fishers must now switch attention to grayling, so it’s out with the box of Red Tags and Treacle Parkins, on with the Barbour jacket and away to the autumn river.

Splitting hairs

A 14-year old girl stands accused of murdering her older sister in a dispute about the potential life trajectory of her boyfriend – destined, says the accused, only ever to work in supermarkets.

Because of the age of the defendant, the judge and barristers have decided that during the trial they will – wait for it – remove their wigs. You really couldn’t make it up.

They will claim that their intention is to avoid intimidating the girl, but exposing any modern teenager to the sort of atrocious hairstyles affected by our legal brethren is nothing less than common assault.

And where does this lead? What bloodcurdling attack-toupées do they have in reserve for the trials of serious career psychopaths?

I suppose it’s pretty clear how all this began. Imagine the scene many thousands of years ago:

A What’s that stuff on your head?

B It’s a wig

A (Looks more closely) But it’s just a clump of mammoth hair and lard

B Yes, it’s good isn’t it?

A It’s fantastic, but what’s it for?

B I thought I might get a job as a judge

A Good call

There is other talismanic headgear at large in the legal environment however. There’s the British policeman’s helmet, recognisable across the galaxy as a symbol of, er, British policemen.

Our police forces constantly try to abandon the helmet in favour of the sort of cool flat caps they’ve seen on cop TV shows, but this is a big mistake.

The old helmet makes our bobbies seem so tall, which has to be an advantage when you’re dealing with desperate villains. Your flat cap is going to make you look like a traffic warden and people are going to feel more like giving you a strong poke in the gob after a few beers on a Friday night.

More importantly, the tall helmet works as a symbolic throwback to the days when the bobby on the beat was the acceptable face of neighbourhood policing – law enforcement at its most socially-targeted.

It has been for so long such a potent symbol of authority that knocking one off a policeman’s head is all you really need to do to make your point. Knifing and shooting our coppers have simply been unnecessary.

Take away the helmet though, and in our darker moments we’ll have to find something else to abuse. A strong poke in the gob will be the least of your worries, constable.

This is all about brand identity, and scrapping heritage, whether in legal headgear or Coca-Cola recipes can bring out the worst in us.

Been there, done that, got the spacesuit

As it’s the silly season, space is in the news (and of course everywhere else as even a rudimentary knowledge of quantum electrodynamics will tell you). Another US shuttle has a hole in its shields, NASA is gearing up to put a telescope on the dark side of the moon and plans are being drawn up for a one-star orbiting hotel. All this is a bit of yawn for the British.

It's not that we're against space as such – with HG Wells, Arthur C Clarke, Dan Dare, Dr Who and Hawkwind on our side, we’ve always considered space to be, well, ours.

Indeed if we’d been a little quicker off the mark in 1945 we could have had our own German rocket scientists, but at the time our leaders obviously felt that this would be cheating and left our space programme in the hands of the Ministry of Works, where it languished.

So, while our government concentrated on minutiae such as rebuilding our bombed-out cities and dismantling our Empire, other forces were obliged to take on the cosmos. While we haven't bothered with anything as flashy as a moon programme, we've had a space station in orbit for years.

Launched discreetly from a water-meadow on the country estate of the British Interplanetary Society, and protected by Klingon cloaking technology, our space station is positioned in a relaxing orbit which brings it over Buckingham Palace every Wednesday afternoon at tea time.

Unlike the International Space Station, which comes across as a random collection of corrugated iron sheds rag-bolted to a pair of windmills, Her Majesty's Space Station Indomitable is from an original idea by Sir Christopher Wren.

Of course there have had to be compromises along the way, but fans of British colloquial architecture will revel in the detail – the shuttle-bay, for example, is thatched.

Whereas in the ISS the astronauts spend all their time either conducting worthy experiments, huddling in tin boxes during power cuts or welding on additional Meccano, aboard HMSS Indomitable it's more or less what you'd expect from the British.

There's an oak-panelled 'drawing room with plenty of space for the dogs, a billiard room and a library opening onto a terrace overlooking the orangery. The saloon bar is staffed by secondment from Claridge’s and the milkman calls on Mondays.

Crew and guests are forbidden to fire upon the ISS as it clanks round in the slow lane and after a tour of duty they normally have to be brought back to Earth by force. Earlier this year a mission was sent up by the National Space Centre to repaint the logo in a serif typeface.

Of course when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic takes over the shuttle franchise his PR people will generate rather more media coverage, but having our brilliant achievements forced out into the open is one of our key communication strategies. Don’t even ask about our time machine, our wormhole cruiser or our immortality patches.

Talking bollocks

In media training courses, people are too often coached on how to talk bollocks. Decoding spokesperson-speak should be compulsory in all media studies curricula.

So, enjoy this Q&A from the BBC’s Today programme, when Evan Davis was questioning our glistening new Foreign Secretary after his first trip to Afghanistan.

Evan Davis: “People whose only contact with the Afghanistan government, the government we're supporting, is when their men come and mow down their only source of income.”

OK, it’s not a question, but neither is what follows an answer.

David Miliband: “Well that if I may say so is a bit of a caricature of what's happening.

This means ”Yes this is what’s happening but you’ve described it rather vividly”, but gives the impression of meaning “this is not what's happening”.

Actually the attack is often that there's not enough eradication going on rather than that there's too much …

That’s a different attack.

… and I think I have got to be very careful not to do a rah-rah for what's going on in Afghanistan. It's difficult, it's dangerous and I don't do a rah-rah, there's no point in pretending otherwise ...

OK, we promise not to pretend that he’s doing a rah-rah.

… Equally though it's important that from a distance we don't fall in to a fatalism that says these people would prefer to grow poppy, they'd prefer to live under the Taliban it's all lost because I was only there for forty eight hours so it's wrong for me to pretend I'm the world expert after 48 hours …

This much is clear.

… But I did talk to Provincial Council, elected Provincial Council in Helmand Province. They don't want to go back to 2001 when women couldn't go to school …

They also probably don’t want their mountains painted blue, but that too is irrelevant here.

… There were three women counsellors out of the seven that I met and they were absolutely clear that good government is basic for them …

And the other four?

… and it means moving forward from the Taliban not moving backward …

Time-wasting.

… and it's the Taliban who are driving the drug, who are pushing the drugs not the international forces or our forces.”

Well I didn’t really think the UN had moved into the smack trade, but is he saying that without the Taliban Afghan farmers would settle down to coaxing asparagus from the soil?

Feeble-minded thinking expressed in meaningless drivel like Miliband’s is much of the problem. There’s a global shortage of opiates yet our policy in Afghanistan is to destroy the raw material. Legalise it, buy it, ship it to where it’s needed (ie right here where listening to this stuff demands serious painkillers in major quantities).

Your media studies homework for tonight: Do a rah-rah.