Author: Scott Andrews

I-Tramp

One evening last week I passed through the city centre in Warsaw and experienced one of those incredibly surreal feelings.  I felt like I was surrounded by glass.  Almost like the people I was watching were in fish tanks.  I was desperately looking for evidence that the outside world is changing, that it’s evolving and I was sadly disappointed.  Instead I was confronted by the fact that very little had  changed.

In any centre city anywhere in the world at anytime of day you can find an eclectic mix of the wise, the wonderful and the weird.  I personally believe that you can measure a city’s greatness by the number of schizophrenic’s per square kilometre.  One thing which is certainly more pronounced in Poland is the fact that you can often see the well off  and the poor in plain sight.  Another quirk of fate is that here you see people(sometimes quite well dressed) trawling through the bins whilst women in their ray bans and men on their mobiles pass by.

In Warsaw we have a number of eccentric folk who can be found in the same place doing the same thing on the same day every week.  My personal favourite is chair man.  He is a busker of sorts who is either barking mad or out of his face on amphetamines who stands outside the main metro station drumming on a chair.  He has the rhythm of a woodpecker with ADHD.  Yet his presence is a reassurance, that some things stay the same.  The other night it was the Fat Lady with the labrador.  Every Thursday night they sit by the underpass entrance begging.  Both the lady and her dog are rather plump, they certainly don’t look hungry, and she is always relatively well dressed.  I have no idea what she does the rest of the week but for 7 years(possibly more) she has begged in the same place come ran or shine.  Part of me wonders whether she has always been there.

One thing which has changed is the street entertainment.  In years gone by their was a group of peruvian indians who would dress up and busk.  I have no idea what became of them as I haven’t seen them for an awfully long time.  Nowadays it seems their pitch has been taken by an evangelical street church.  I like to stop for a few minutes every time they are there as they appear to be barking mad.  It seems that their tactic is to pay tramps to give thrilling speeches along the lines of  I used to drink everyday.  I was an alcoholic.  Until Jesus saved me.’  Just once I hope to hear someone shout out a correction ‘No.  You used to be an alcoholic, until you stopped drinking.’  I have probably spent 10-15 minutes of my life listening to the street church and I have only ever heard ex-alcoholics speaking.  Admittedly Poland does have a major alcohol problem, yet still I am surprised that God apparently spends so much of his time  saving alcoholics rather than the millions of starving children in the world.

It delights me that in Warsaw you can find a wide variety of buskers.  They vary by age, instrument and talent.  They create a wonderful ambience which in moments of introspection allow you to convince yourself that world isn’t such a shitty place.  I have seen men in their 70’s performing a number of gypsy love songs in Spanish, I have seen Romanians playing dirges on their accordions,  young people playing a diverse range of songs we an acoustic guitar and a cup of spare change.  However none of these beat my favourite.  There is an old man who first appeared around a year and a half ago.  He sits in one underpass and plays a harmonica.  A year and a half ago he was awful, and now he is marginally better.  The great thing has been actually being able to notice his improvement.  He is so much a fixture of my life that I feel like I should name him.

One thing which hasn’t changed in 7 years is the number of people who harass you for spare change or cigarettes.  When I smoked I used to consider it a city centre tax levy.  Now I don’t I generally get irritable remarks and dirty looks.  Last week I was walking from the underground station to the bus station when a man approached me and asked me for a cigarette.  Habitually I like to study these people and see if I get any feeling about how genuine these people are.  This man had a smartish green jacket, his jeans were in good condition and his trainers were a dirty white.  In other words he looked relatively normal.  When I told him I don’t smoke, he asked me if I had any spare change without offering any reason why.  Just as I reached into my pocket a telephone rang.  The man reached into his pocket and I shit you not, pulled out an I-phone.  As he answered I walked away, and I didn’t look back.

Sell Out Or Stay Home

Last night I submitted my novel to the next agent on my list.  This time caring less about protocol and more about leaving my fingerprint on my submission.  I don’t really know why some part of me feels it will make a difference, nonetheless it does.  Somehow I can’t make myself believe that personal marketing has any impression on an agent’s psyche, especially when the bottom line of any business is profit.

I don’t know whether it’s caused by self-doubt but I find myself thinking more and more about why I didn’t try to write a commercial novel.  It is not as if I deliberately tried not to either.  I had an idea which wouldn’t leave me alone.  Eventually I decided to follow this idea to its conclusion.  It wrote itself.  When I try to be objective I find myself searching for excuses to explain why it won’t be published, and at the head of the list is its genre.

Now I find myself wondering if that’s what I should do.  If I want to write so badly why not try my hand at something more populist.  Do I have it in me to write about camp hairdressing vampires, junkie wizards or a detective who is addicted to knitting jumpers for horses?  As this point I don’t know.

Perhaps I wrote something ‘literary’ to give me an excuse to fail.  If I had written something commercial I would only be left with the fact that perhaps my writing is not good enough?

It’s not that I have anything against commercial literature.  It’s merely that I prefer a book to have soul.  Catch 22, Yellow Train, Shantaram, Seeing and Yes Man are very different books but they have an aura about them which can eat through your skull and devour your brain.  Books like these are seldom published these days.  And it saddens me.

For me the honesty of the printed page is the last domain of the thinking man.  Many naysayers claim that we are witnessing the death throes of the book.  They claim that the advancement of technology has rendered the book obsolete.  I would rather say that the stagnation of the publishing industry has been an act of suicide.  The reluctance to take gambles and the obsession with ever-expanding profits mean that fiction no longer has any trailblazers.  The novel has been moving sideways for decades.  Despite this I don’t believe we will ever witness the death of the book, it will merely change shape.

Lessons About Travelling

This weeks news stories have been awash with stories of travelling.  Whether it be people travelling, neutrino’s travelling or a satellite travelling towards earth.  It’s been a wonderfully refreshing look at the stupidity of mankind.

Let’s start with the people travellers.  In yet another example of the stupidity of political correctness and the general stupidity of the human race the story of Dale Farm has been dominating the headlines in the UK.  It relates to a group of gypsies who have settled on a piece of land and want to stay there.  However the local government wants to evict them as this land belongs to someone else.  In a nutshell they are illegally squatting on land which doesn’t belong them, which by all accounts is against the law.  BBC is full of interviews with these squatters explaining that they are ‘travellers'(their preferred name for themselves) and they will never give up their way of life.  Newspapers are full of headlines such as  ‘save the travellers homes.’ and no one sees the insanity of their own statements. The day they settled at Dale Farm they ceased to be travellers and they became squatters.  To be a traveller you need to fucking travel.  Staying in one place is not travelling.  It’s not moving.

The scientific world was stunned to discover that Einstein was wrong.  After spending billions of pounds designing super extravagant overly complicated toys scientists have found something which travels faster than the speed of light.  The perfectly named sounds a bit like some monsters in Super Mario, Neutrino’s.  First of all I find it incredible the brightest minds in sciences are surprised when a 100-year-old theory is proved incorrect.  As scientists you would expect that they expect new discoveries to be made all the time.  The number of  influential scientists who have been proved wrong over time is extensive.  As science evolves, new techniques are discovered, new equipment is designed, the scientific truth is ever-changing.  The most incredible thing about these smug arrogant scientists who are on our tv screens taking discreet pleasure in using the words wrong and Einstein in the same sentence is their grasp of history.  One reason why Einstein may not have realised that there is something that travels faster than the speed of light is the fact that the Neutrino was discovered in 1959.  Where as Einstein died in 1955.  So excuse me for suggesting that this fact is crucial.  The second thing I would like to point out in Einstein’s defence is that the Theory of Relativity is…. well….. a fucking theory for God’s sake.

I will close with a few musings on the satellite which crash landed somewhere.  I say somewhere as no one knows where on earth(great choice of expression) that satellite landed.  That’s right for all the money, gadgets and brilliant minds NASA employs they could not track an enormous satellite as it hurtled towards the earth.  Its reassuring to know that nothing untoward could have happened.  That there was 0 chance of anyone losing their life.  Seriously what chance would we have if Aliens ever invaded.  Fifty percent of humanity would be arguing over whether we should call them aliens, travellers or space travellers.  Scientists would be morris dancing with delight due to the fact that the existence of aliens would prove that a large number of famous scientists were completely wrong while NASA will tell us that they are coming, they just wouldn’t know where and when.  Seriously we are fucked.  If this is the best the human race has to offer, then we belong in the special olympics.

Winning Or The Modern Day Lack Of

Charlie Sheen is winning.  Manchester United are winning.  America is winning.  President Obama was winning once, not so sure now.  Many countries are winning wars.  Wars on crime, corruption, bureaucracy, waste to name just a few.  People win races.  Space races, arm races, leg races, races to the top, to the white house and to the moon.  If everyone is winning, or is capable of winning something, where on earth are the losers?  Everywhere.

Winning and losing used to be used in specific areas, sport and war.  In the U.K winning at sport is now considered a bad thing.  So much so that many schools do not allow kids to participate in sports where there  is a winner and a loser in fear of psychologically marking the child for life.  It has been conclusively proved by Scientific winners that losing a game of netball at the age of 8 often leads to a life of crack addiction, petty crime and prostitution.  Where as stateside they are the polar opposite.  They do not appreciate any sport which can result in a draw.  There must be a result.  Which is why the average rounders baseball game takes three and a half years on average to complete.

The winning of wars has became somewhat since Vietnam.  In a war, where if you believe America, both sides won(isn’t that called a draw in other realms) has become even more farcical in recent conflicts.  On Friday the 2nd of May 2003 George W.Bush declared that the allies had in fact won the war in Iraq.  What he failed to do was tell anyone else about this development.

It is apparent that just about the whole universe has forgotten what winning actually means.  It doesn’t matter if you pretend it doesn’t happen like us Brits, or that you claim it’s happened already, much like the Yanks you are wrong.  The condition of victory deems that someone must lose.  We have lost sight of the valiant loser. We are so terrified of the word failure we now live in a state where we pretend it doesn’t exist.  The fucked up thing is that we now have a large proportion of people who live there lives trying not to fail rather than trying to live.  Whereas true honour comes from trying, of being able to look yourself in the eye, and being able to say that I gave it my best.

The Battle Of Troy

Troy Davis is dead.  Executed.  He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.  That sentence has now been carried out.  It amazes me that some states in America still believe in the death penalty.  The first recorded execution took place in 1608.  403 years later it appears that America still hasn’t realised that the threat of the death penalty does not deter would be murderers.  That number alone is pretty damning.

I am not a lawyer so I do not wish to open a legal debate.  However I do wish to mention a few facts which for me are striking.  First of all 7 from 9 witnesses recanted their testimony amid allegations that they were pressured by the police to make their original statements.  A story which is all to familiar.  Regarding actual physical evidence.  At the crime scene forensic investigators found 0 evidence to connect Davis to the crime.  Another striking number.  Another man named Sylvester Cole confessed to the crime to three people.  However as he was never called as a rebuttal witness at the trial his confession was dismissed as hearsay.  Two witnesses gave statements connection Cole to a firearm in the direct aftermath of the incident.  Another witness placed him at the crime scene.  No murder weapon was ever found.  I don’t know enough about the case to give a rounded legal opinion but as a human being I can say that it sounds a little like reasonable doubt to me.

It’s hard to be completely honest about the death penalty.  As much as I believe it is wrong, if a loved one of mine was directly affected by a serious crime by position would almost certainly change instantly.  I would be a liar if I said otherwise.  The troubling fact about the eye for an eye on concept is that by and large it does not work.  As an example it is fundamentally flawed.  A decent human being should never wish harm onto anyone.  Yet most of us are not decent.  I don’t know what part of this story is the most wrong.  The murder, the dubious conviction or the fact that a seemingly guilty man has got away with a crime scot-free.