Letter from London: Formed of Frailty and Error

Photograph Source: Lesekreis – CC0 1.0

Against a backdrop of continued change in the world, the artist here in London has come to the end of another large piece. It is challengingly good, intricate, not easy. Beautiful. Maintaining a careful distance while trying to film it, I’m reminded yet again of Charles Dickens’ visit to John Ruskin’s studio when a new painting was on the wall and Dickens was approaching it with an outstretched finger. ‘Don’t!’ shouted Ruskin: ‘It’s still wet!’ To which Dickens replied: ‘I’ve got gloves on.’ Come to think of it, the artist here is probably less frivolous.

I still awake 5.30am most mornings, the urban sky an ethereal and electric purple-maroon colour. Above the birdsong I hear the first of the passenger jets and wonder how many are arriving peopled with excitement. After all, joy has been sucked from the city some, though a marvellously defiant light still glows from within. Just as many Londoners love their city especially when everything is not fine and dandy.

Both the young and old in this household enjoyed the work of the now late David Lynch. In November 1985 at a New York gallery on Wooster Street, Jedd Garet, a former Rhode Island School of Design student who studied with three members of Talking Heads including David Byrne, was showing. Cookie Mueller had written the catalogue essay. Anyway, a few days later David Lynch entered, looking dapper and wearing a cape. He was with Isabella Rossellini and pointed to one of the larger Garet paintings with an elegant stick, which he probably did not need. It’s so ugly, he said to Rossellini, in that reedy, faintly high-pitched smoker’s voice of his. Ugly, I said, nervously? (I was working at the gallery.) Ugly, he repeated. You don’t like it, I continued? I love it, he beamed. Don’t worry, Rossellini smiled at me: He does ugly.

I have to say, the football—or soccer—here has been so good of late. There were three stupendous matches on the trot for me last week. A good game contains everything—hope, despair, redemption, contest, skill. Football however is grieving Denis Law, the gifted Aberdonian of the Busby-led ‘Holy Trinity’ completed by Bobby Charlton and George Best. It’s just a shame so many supporters are ripped off by club owners—even normally sparring Liverpool and Manchester United fans have joined forces to protest against their respective American owners.

Last week’s Hegseth hearing was quite something for those of us watching it here regardless of the outcome at the time. Maybe it was the prospect of a £695bn ($849bn) defence budget and over three million employees awaiting a man with experience of no more than 200 people which was doing it for us. Let alone the fact so many of those people are women who did not exactly receive a vote of confidence. It was like expecting a courtroom drama only to find everyone still in rehearsal. I have met people like Hegseth who were in the US military in Afghanistan. They were not all national guardsmen and all had dust on their boots, to use his favoured phrase. Brits were ‘flying blind’ with them, too. The same Brits whose country was still tiresomely under attack from certain sectors of the new administration last week. Also, didn’t Trump devour three US Secretaries of Defence in the last year alone of his first presidency? The late poet WH Auden said of himself that his face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain. Maybe that was it. The hearing was like a wedding cake left out in the rain. We should know. Under the last government here we left an entire country out in the rain.

It has been cold here. Some of it from the famous Arctic Blast. Talking about the weather remains a peculiarly British thing to do and yet so connected is it to our pockets these days that any discussion about it soon becomes one of economics. Brits cannot fathom how expensive everything remains. The price of heating plus water and waste disposal in Spain for example is an astonishing 40% cheaper.

It’s official. There are more whales around our coasts than we have known in a long while. I gather this is because of warming waters creating a more northerly ‘circulation’ of so-called prey. Excitingly, there have been humpback whales from Norway sighted in the eastern side of the English Channel—normally they ‘travel’ the western side of the UK, having abandoned the eastern route following years of nineteenth and twentieth century slaughter.

When the ceasefire in Gaza finally began last Sunday, of course everyone was hoping it would hold. Extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had earlier threatened to resign if the Israeli cabinet ratified the deal. Charm-school he is not but ratified it was, though those closest to the action note the problem remains occupation, plus Hamas boasting more fresh recruits than lost in the fighting. I can only imagine how those first few moments of the ceasefire must have felt for those on the ground, especially among the young. We just have to presume Trump does not want this conflict to continue. ‘He has bigger fish to fry,’ said LSE professor Fawaz Gerges, author of What Really Went Wrong, last week. The question is, though, which bigger fish?

As Poland and the UK held talks over Starmer’s plans for a post-Brexit reset and new UK-Poland security treaty, I was trying to work out if it was still the case that so many of our problems stem from Brexit, including non-EU immigration and the way this issue has morphed into woke and anti-woke bandwagons, not to mention the latest ‘masculine’ bandwagon, whether we care to admit it or not. Even Tory leader Kemi Badenoch admitted last week the Tories didn’t have a post-Brexit plan. Nor am I alone in believing Brexit the touchpaper for the destruction of what had until then been peaceable European cohesion. The split excited an already involved Russia and made the more extreme elements of a Trump seem more possible. Also, Europe was far stronger with us than without us. Now, on a really bad day, Europe risks becoming an ugly patchwork of anti-immigrant far-Right parties, which—who knows—maybe one or two more extreme Brexiteers might wish to re-join one day. I know of at least one super-meddling oligarch across the Atlantic right now who would like to see all of Europe become far-Right. Thankfully, he is far less popular here than his sycophants allow him to believe.

They for sure fail to grasp how many people of so many different persuasions want things to get better. Even liberals know the thorny and divisive issue of immigration will not go away. The Labour government must surely know this too. Fresh data shows a far higher rise in immigration than expected—1.1 million foreign nationals have been added to the UK population every year since 2021, with only 10 per cent EU nationals. Even the world of podcasts’ mild-mannered Rory Stewart, presently teaching at Yale, has called present numbers ‘grotesque’. It is also remains incorrect to call out concerns over immigration as necessarily Right-wing, though continued weaponisation on social media of the appalling grooming gangs from mostly 1997 to 2012 is horrific. How to defuse its bedfellow hatred remains the real challenge—which is difficult when some of the language is so inflammatory. How to avoid the brute force and dangerous optics of mass deportation would presumably be a problem over here too. Maybe I am being naive but I do believe people from all sides of any argument should and can come together on this. Someone I know and like a lot wrote to me recently: “Although we have different political views, it heartens we’re not at loggerheads as is the fashion.’

The only other solution is to give up on argument altogether. To abandon all social media. Utter blandness is another option. Glee at other people’s suffering. Total submission to the new oligarchs. Nah, strike that one. That’s not going to work.

Peter Bach lives in London.