So, where are we? Baby Judith is just over three months of age now, and is beginning to turn into a person. Last night, in her cot, I watched her laugh. I had not seen this yet, although Victoria claims she has done it before. A significant moment: Aristotle believed that this moment indicated the transition from mere organism to full human.

I have an annoying cold at the moment, which follows last week’s more-than-annoying bout of Noro Virus which I shared with Victoria. Thankfully, because Judith is still completely breastfed, she escaped this ghastly disease. Had she not, she’d have had to spend days in hospital, with IV fluids. Hooray for breast feeding and its magic Just In Time antibody production!

Anyway, a fairly quiet day at work, ended with a Burger King which I didn’t enjoy particularly. There’s something sad about being too ill to enjoy the greasy horror of junk food. Then an underwhelming episode of Lost, a bath and a fairly sleepless night, thanks to the cold and Judith, who has decided that her cot is evil.

Before the First World War, the Democratic Republic of Palestine was peopled by a peaceful nation of Muslims and Christians, living together in harmony, as they had done there for thousands of years. A verdant proto-Socialist oasis in the Middle East, its capital Jerusalem was a beacon of architectural brilliance and societal tolerance that the war-mongering West could only envy, an envy turned bloodily real in the many attempted Crusades against it. As the most holy city of Islam and Christianity, it remained the cool, calm centre of contemplation for both religions, and welcomed pilgrims from all nations. Islam, meaning “peace”, could never have imagined the evil intents of the new generation of Crusaders who were just around the corner and, worse, the alien agents who would come in their wake to wreak vengeful devastation on this ancient utopia.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the rapacious West, particularly the newly energised United States, could not bear to think of the Democratic Republic of Palestine’s continued existence, a shining challenge to the venal mercantile colonialism so desired by the West and its Banker controllers.

So, after the 1st World War, the United States and the Great Britain took their moment to begin the flaying of the Democratic Republic of Palestine. Britain invaded the country and immediately deposed its democratically elected leaders, imposing a brutal colonial regime upon the unsuspecting populace. But this was not just any old ordinary colonial venture – there was a sting in the Imperial Tale by the name of Balfour.

Lord Balfour, a British war-mongerer, had been desperate to develop new weapons of mass destruction so better to quell the natives in Britain’s repressed colonies. To get them, he needed funding from The Jewish Bankers, and technical help from The Jewish Scientists. So, he payed for this assistance with the blood-money of a promise: that these Jewish interests might devour the British Colony of Palestine.

Now, why should The Jewish Establishment have desired Palestine? After all, Palestine was about as Jewish as a bacon sandwich, and contained none of the precious metals and minerals which historically attract Jewish interest. In fact, their interest was based on some vague “promises” in their bible about the territory, combined with a new form of ultra-right-wing racist supremacist nationalism, which had been born as a brother to fascism: Zionism. Zionism proclaimed that the Jews were, indeed the Chosen People, and thus needed to build a temporal empire from which they could extend their already-significant control. They perceived one significant threat to this: the increasing popularity of the ever-peaceful Islam, which banned usury as part of its proto-Socialist ideals. So where better for Zionists arbitrarily to seek subjugation than in the place where Muslims and Christians lived in such content equality: The Democratic Republic of Palestine! And thus, Zionism had begun its dark ascent, given demonic momentum by Lord Balfour and his declaration that Great Britain would agree to the Zionists’ plundering the Democratic Republic of Palestine under Great Britain’s benign watch.

And so, throughout the 20s and 30s, Jews started swarming, for the first time in history, to the Democratic Republic of Palestine (under British Occupation). Lord Rothschild and others provided the swarm with cash to buy up houses and farms below market rate by making the historical occupants an “offer they couldn’t refuse”. The citizens of the Democratic Republic of Palestine barely had time to recognise what had hit them. For the first time in the Middle East, peaceful Islam and turn-the-other-cheek Christianity had to contend with alien occupants, with alien, Old Testament notions of “An Eye for an Eye” and vengeful smiting. It began to seem as if these notions would infect the whole country – a new disease against which the native aboriginal inhabitants, as ever, had not previously had any exposure, and thus had no immunity.

Then came the West’s next Imperial adventure: the Second World War. The Jews in Germany had been envied for their evident control of the media, politics and the economy, and the Nazis exploited this unease and killed many Jews, along with many Gypsies, Catholics, Muslims and Gay people, in what has come to be termed “the Holocaust”.

The Zionists, ever to find gold in a mire, took advantage of this misfortune and began to encourage Jews from all over the world to descend upon the Democratic Republic of Palestine (under British Occupation). The British, finally realising their folly in allowing Balfour his tawdry deal, tried to repel them, but the waves of Zionists simply continued. Zionist terrorists began to slaughter the native occupants of the land, along with British soldiers and, eventually, used their influence to force the United Nations into ceding the Democratic Republic of Palestine to them, lock, stock and barrel. The world stood by, having been convinced by the wily Zionists to remain quiet out of shame for “the Holocaust”. The Zionists now had attained their wildest dreams, and wildly indeed would they wreak.

The Arab countries immediately made an offer of peaceful coexistence, as was their wont, but the Zionists rejected peace out of hand, flailing out in 1948 to try and annexe even more territory beyond the borders of the Democratic Republic of Palestine. The Arab countries whom the Zionists attacked had been used to living peacefully with their neighbours, and so had not the experience to repel these new invaders. Thus the Zionist, imbued in Old Testament aggression, won the day. They were free to pillage their way through their conquered dominion in a frenzy of ethnic cleansing, slaughtering anyone who did not flee from their newly captured country. The world looked on and said nothing.

The Zionists renamed their conquered territory as “Israel”, which means “The warmongers of God” in their language. They turned the secular proto-socialist democracy into a military theocracy, where only Jews would be allowed to live and work as citizens. Anyone else allowed into the country would, effectively, be a slave without rights.

Thus “Israel” remained an ever-spreading cancer upon the Middle East for the following decades, and the remaining survivors of the Democratic Republic of Palestine had been corralled into concentration camps along its borders, where they were treated like animals primed for slaughter. And slaughtered they often were. Their Arab brothers tried to help them and give them sustenance, but every time this was attempted “Israel” reacted violently and annexed even more land, as happened in 1967 (when the Zionists finally completed their pillage of Jerusalem) and 1973, when they stole Egyptian land.

By this time, even the most craven of Western nations began to realise the true perfidy of the Zionist project, and the UN put out resolution after resolution against the tyranny; but all were cowed into submission by the United States of America, whose strong Jewish Lobby forced the nation into supporting the “Israel” adventure, no matter what harm this support brought to America. And thus did the United States begin to provide billions of dollars and thousands of weapons to the Theocracy of Israel, turning the formerly peaceful Middle East into a seething tinderbox.

As the Jewish/Israel Lobby grew ever stronger (as documented by Mearsheimer and Walt), United States policy became utterly perverted to the will of its supposedly client state. Any powerful countermeasure to Zionist power needed to eradicated, at any cost. Thus, Afghanistan and Iraq were attacked, after fabricating any number of justifications. Afghanistan, because it contained freedom fighters opposed to US/Zionist hegemony, and Iraq because it contained a leader opposed to US/Zionist hegemony – and who happened to have an oil-rich state to boot. And thus, the West began its war against peaceful Islam, always at the behest of the cackling “Israel”, delighted to have such ostensibly powerful lackeys.

Meanwhile, the remnants of the Democratic Republic of Palestine, shoved into the West Bank and Gaza, began to regain consciousness after their brutal beating. And, a Gandhi-like figure emerged: Yasser Arafat. A citizen born of the Democratic Republic of Palestine, he exuded a calm love of peace that nevertheless belied a strength of purpose and a determination that his people might one day be freed of Zionist oppression, to return to their homes, their farms and their peaceful life of productive coexistence. For decades, he battled to liberate his nation, but the Zionists threw everything at him that they could. He would constantly make generous offers of coexistence, and even to split the Democratic Republic into two, so that the Zionists could remain, even though illegitimate and alien to these lands. And the Zionists rejected every offer, no matter how generous. In the end, Arafat, for all his best efforts, died under suspicious circumstances. But even the most reactionary of Zionist-controlled news media realised that here was a passing of someone, like Nelson Mandela, who might be termed a worldly saint. For example, Barbara Plett of the BBC could not help but admit: “When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry”. Even the strongest of Zionist brain-washing couldn’t hide the truth to her, and to millions of others, who started to campaign for the Palestinians throughout the world.

But, after Arafat, the Palestinians began to realise, with much sorrow, that turning the other cheek as they had done until now would not work against such a vicious opponent. And, with much regret, they began to fight back with the only things they had: stones, some primitive fireworks and their very bodies. The humiliation of the ghetto, of occupation and of such abject subjugation meant that they could only live to be martyrs, trying to dislodge the enemy by blowing up their very bodies as a cry of rage against their circumstance. Politicians around the world recognised the pathos of this, of freedom fighters who prepared to lose their life in the cause of freedom, but few were prepared to go on the record. The few who did, like Britain’s Jenny Tonge, were vilified as somehow “anti-semitic’.

Indeed, the Zionist had the accusation of “anti-semitism” as one of their most powerful weapons (other than their illegally produced nuclear arms, of course). They would lob this epithet at the most gentle of questioners about the ethics behind Zionism’s genocidal rampages. When “Israel” arbitrarily decided to destroy the Palestinian ghetto of Jenin, for example, an Italian cartoon that responded showing Jews re-crucifying Jesus with a girl asking “mama, why are they doing it to him again and again” was decried as somehow “anti-semitic”. A cartoon of the Prime Minister of Israel eating a Palestinian baby was also, somehow, construed as “anti-semitic”. The cover of a British magazine with a Star of David piercing the British flag with the headline “Kosher Conspiracy” was also determined, arbitrarily, “anti-semitic”. As with any currency, however, it became increasingly worthless by inflation. Soon, even the most sympathetic Zionist-appeasers were to tire of this meaningless term’s constant abuse. It was clear that “anti-semitism” did not exist. What did exist was Islamophobia, a phenomenon the Zionist media refused to report.

In Gaza, one of the Democratic Republic of Palestine ghettos, a group had formed called “Hamas”. This group combined progressive Socialism with the peace-loving attributes of Islam and vowed to regain the nation. Unlike “Israel”, the remnants of Palestine remained stubbornly democratic, and voted for Hamas, who quickly began providing collectivised services to Palestine and fighting back against “Israeli” aggression as best it could. The Zionists responded by building huge walls around the ghetto, and refused to allow any supplies or people through the checkpoints in these walls without substantial harassment, particularly of old women and young children. This frustration in trade brought the ghettos to an ever worse state of decrepitude, which seemed to suit the Zionists fine, because they were preparing for their Final Solution against the Gazan inhabitants – to wipe them and their freedom-fighting Hamas representatives out in one fell genocidal swoop.

In Operation Cast Lead, the “Israelis” began their genocidal attack, in accordance with the brutal Old Testament principles in their bible. They firebombed the ghetto, killed children, smashed schools and hospitals and reduced Gaza to mere rubble, all for the gleeful entertainment of the “Israeli” electorate, whose candidates vied with each other in proclaiming how bloody their further rampage would be, just as they had done years before in their invasion of the Socialist Republic of Lebanon, another thorn in their side for representing Christian/Muslim harmony so close to home.

So we are brought up to date: “Israel”, the most fascist, brutish, dangerous pseudo-state ever to have come into existence proves to be key to every single conflict and conflagration on the planet, be it the collapsed economies of the world (America’s having spent all its money in hoc to protecting the Zionists and refunding the Zionist bankers), global warming and environmentalism (“Israel” has massively distorted water ecology in the Middle East, as well as manufacturing any number of carbon-emitting electronica) and the Disillusion of Muslim Youth (who have no faith in Western Democracy when they see the West’s continuing to kowtow to the genocidal Zionists who slaughter their brothers).

A few brave souls are fighting back: the United Nations, despite its hampering from the US, continues to try to reveal the true extent of Zionist perfidy; leftist organisations like the Socialist Workers’ Party and the University and College Union in alliance with David Duke, the US politician; fearless and selfless politicians in RESPECT and its descendant parties; diplomats who dare speak their minds like Rowan Laxton; and an increasing number of brave protesters who, despite Zionist efforts, have begun to realise the nuanced history of the Middle East and the horror that the “Israel” project has brought forth.

So when a bunch of Yanks try to perform one of his sonnets as rap (ooh, Shakey is kewl!) or pretend that Hamlet was a management consultant or some other sub-”Now Show” arse, it takes something bad and unfunny and metastasises it into something so cringe-worthy that you have to be in a strange position of cowed reverence and pseudy insecurity to pretend it has any worth. I shall discuss the polluting effects of Shakespeare worship soon. For now, it’s enough to get you to promise never to give these desperate stage-monkeys your cash. Just because they’re “clever” is no excuse to frequent them. The world is full of clever dullards. Go and see some modern comic theatre instead. Or better still, forget the dull and dusty medium and see a film. How now, sirrah? Oh, do shut up.

Open your eyes. If it was ever like this, it’s nothing like it now. It is nothing less than a con-job, trying to sell you planks for more than they’re worth in a venue designed to the Catholic Church’s plans for purgatory. I visited it on the way home from work,, so I turned up before Mrs Trellis. I wandered about the place, meandering amidst the kitsch and trashy, the pseudo-suave and the Bauhaus-come-deckchair faux-sophistication in the twee stage-set rooms, replete with their hollow plastic televisions regarded by hollow plastic minds. I cast my rapidly descaling eyes over the furniture. The gawping hoardes suddenly seemed like cattle, being tricked into grazing astroturf. I tried to give the pieces of furniture a greater critical appraisal than the average brand-sponged dribblers about me. And do you know what? The great veneered majority of it was utter tat. Cupboards that didn’t quite close. Chipboard that wasn’t quite encapsulated. Metal legs that weren’t quite flush in meeting buckling glass table-tops. The design was pedestrian. The finish was invariably lacklustre and chipped. The material was weary and its construction duncical.

Worse than any specific cut corners (sometimes literal) was the obvious fact that these objects were constructed for the benefit of the machines that hew them and boxed them – for the efficiency of their initial production rather than any variety or elegance in their final use. The cynicism-made-chipboard was palpable. Here’s a company that packages cheap boards with holes in them, adds a chamfer, and ramps up the “we’re stylish” brand to Emperor’s New Clothes heights. It puts them in a cattlepen warehouse of a store and ensures their supplicants have to wait in gargantuan queues for the privilege of purchasing the tat. God forbid one of the richest men in the world should employ a couple more checkout staff at minimum wage so that his wretchedly pliant customers might leave within an hour of joining a chaotic queue. Never mind the abasement of the experience – they’ll still come back in their swinish droves, even when that abasement leads to the savage Tat Riots at Ikea sales earlier this year. If you repeat the word “stylish” often enough, I guess people believe it. They believe it enough to maim. The glassy eyed maimers were there this evening too, in their hateful queue-barging droves. I realised that I would be duty-bound to include myself in this field of hate if I did not vow then and there never to return to this yellow and blue Hades again.

By the time Mrs Trellis arrived, my mood was dark. We were certainly not going to purchase any bookshelves here, with their hateful cardboard-thin backing and wobbly inadequacies. It is far more honest and attractive to place planks of wood between some bricks. If I could not afford a proper set of shelves made up by a craftsman who gives a damn, or from a shop that understands the true depths that the relationship between material, form and design needs to attain, then I would happily continue with said improvised brick-and-plank shelving until I could afford the real thing. Ikea is no the “real” thing. It does not represent a happy mean between style and affordability. It is just mean. Better to keep books in cardboard boxes or strewn across the floor.

Mrs Trellis had, by this time, though, picked up some wrapping paper and a small foot-wiper rug. She decided, by some dint of stubborness, that she would make the purchase, having picked it up, by hook or by crook, even though she agreed it was the last time she would do so. On seeing the mind-boggling queues, she almost lost her nerve. The aeroplane-hangar sized checkout area had about 5% of its available tills staffed, which meant that queues wound themselves into the dank collection area warehouse. How generous. It was as if here was a collection of dull and stupid middle class refugees queuing in some hellish processing centre, desperate for some sort of asylum at the other end. The horrible people with their horrible trollies filled with horrible slabs of horribly veneered horrible MDF. Chipboard is a bunch of cheap scraps of wood bound together under pressure by a thin veneer. Ikea customers are a bunch of cheap idiots bound together under the pressured delusion that they’re better than those who shop at MFI, and equal to craftsmen carpenters because they stick some glued dahls into an ill-fitting hole. If you are one of these people, and persist in defending this apotheosis of dismal post-modern Capitalism, I’ll be happy to sell you a melanin-lined self-assemble clue: Düll-ård.

There are two views on what we can expect in oil’s twilight years – the “oy vey” eschatological pessimism at one end, and the “what, me worry?” eupeptic mien at the other. I know of people who subscribe to both extremes, each with a joyous vehemency. My old colleague, Paul Smeddle, in between learning to eat olives and getting excited about space rockets, was wont to propound his “death of civilisation” Jeremiads. These were predicated on the supposition that we’re running out of oil, there’s nothing to replace it, and nobody’s working on any alternatives that’ll be ready in time. All that we value in the West – our heat, light, transport, plastics, medicine and technology – will come tumbling down, and our civilisation is doomed.

At the other extreme, I know several who believe that The Market Will Provide. We need not worry, because These Things Sort Themselves Out. After all, look at the fuss about the Y2K bug. Look at the Malthusian panic in the 1960s about over-population by the 1980s. Look at the prediction that we’d run out of protein. The latter one is a fascinating panic which, in fact, led to the development of Quorn. None of these panics turned out to be justified, and the ingeniousness of late capitalism provided a bounty for those lucky enough to live in the West.

I feel that neither extreme pessimism nor ludicrous optimism has much rational substance about it. Optimism relies on a secundum quid et simpliciter fallacy. To an extent, so does pessimism. One assumes that some observed machination of our economy, of our character and our reactive circumstances necessarily colours how we will deal with the end of oil. We are offered no such certainty. This makes things interesting.

Certainly, some expectations we currently enjoy will be confounded: no more cheap flights seems to be one of the safest predictions one might make. Enjoy aviation’s supernova while it lasts. Biofuels should allow hybrid cars to remain on the road, and passenger ships to remain afloat. It wouldn’t be that much of a surprise to find trans-atlantic liner travel resume as the less expensive way of traversing the pond. Zeppelins might make a return as well.

Centralised power will probably be primarily fission, initially. Who knows when, if ever, fusion will be viable. Newer generations of power stations should be less costly to build and decommision, and the lack of oil’s bounty will provide a fillip to further efficiency still. This relative abundance of centralised power will allow for the recharging of hybrid engines, or perhaps the mass production of hydrogen as a clean vehicular fuel. It’ll also probably power the trains that will have taken over much short-haul flying. Maglev rail could take over some medium haul over-land routes too, all powered by the nuclear centre and, to an extent, wind, hydroelectric and some biofuel power stations. This central power, then, will have a primary function of producing energy for the connected transport infrastructure, and to produce hydrogen gas.

Homes and small factories could be self-sufficient. Indeed, even now, replacing roof-tiles with modern solar collectors could provide all the energy required for every average household, even in a dim country like Britain. This is not space-age hopefulness, but the conservative possibility of current technology. Certainly, kitting out the nation’s roofs with such technology won’t come cheap, but as oil slides away, we’ll no doubt use the last dregs to fund the production of such facilities – nothing Star Trek, but just mundane solutions which, until now, we’ve had no need to consider on a wide scale.

I’ve a feeling – it’s admittedly little more than faith – that eventually, we’ll stumble on another “free lunch”, be it cold fusion, zero point energy or a similar panacea. Until then, we’ll muddle on, adapting with neither the grace proposed by the optimists, nor with the ineptitude imagine by the pessimists. Our transition from oil to whatever comes next will probably be somewhat anticlimactic. Maybe the years ahead won’t be quite so fascinating at all, as is usually the case with predicted calamities. It’s the unpredicted ones that are interesting.

My company has a small office near Canary Wharf on the 33rd floor. I notice little rituals played out by the lifts on every visit. For example, I’ve realised that people often time their approach to the cluster of lifts so that they just miss one that appears already inhabited. This is especially true when they are confident another is on the way. They sort of slope up to the lifts, and suddenly become distracted by their watch, their phone or the plaque on the wall indicating fire regulations. The doors of the “missed” lift close. The deliberator pulls his eyes away from the watch/phone/plaque, waits a moment, and presses the button to summon the next one. There is amusing room for error in this routine, though: sometimes he presses the summoning button too quickly – the full lift he had tried to avoid hasn’t had time to leave, and so “helpfully” slides open. His strategy in tatters, he now has to make a sheepish entrance all the while other pristine lifts are arriving just around him. Sometimes I am he.

Of course, the Docklands Busy-busy-businessman more usually suffers from the Must Get The Next Lift mentality than the Must Avoid This Full Lift angst outlined above. The disease is related to the Must Get This Tube-train malady which afflicts all self-important Londoners. Even when an empty tube-train surely follows a packed sardine tin, Mr Busy-busy must barge his way into the present overflowing carriage, as if the minute’s delay he’d have to endure till the next train pulled up would make a difference worth millions of pounds, lives or Gilts. In all likelihood, of course, the minute he saved on arriving home would be used for little more than giving his scrotum a scratch or staring into the fridge. As with trains, though, a closing lift means urgent panic. Busy-busy runs toward the closing doors, jamming his hand, foot, briefcase or secretary in the gap, piling into the lift as if he’s just hopped on to the last rocket off a dying planet. “Ping”. Another two lifts have arrived in the time he’s performed his self-important acrobatics. He’s impervious to the glares, though. He’s Busy.

Of course, lift rituals continue once one’s in. It is important to stare at the floor number-indicator. The lifts in Canary Wharf have little television screens with, bizarrely, stills of people about to enter private jets. This makes a welcome focal point, and helps to prevent that supreme faux-pas of lift eye-contact. Where one positions oneself in a lift depends on its occupancy, and is fraught with complication well beyond this discussion. The placement matrix is subtle and the product of a highly complex set of innate rules – perhaps more so even than with men at urinals.

When I’m in a lift with a friend or colleague, I like to have some sort of odd conversation with him or her. It is entertaining to watch any other lift inhabitants try to ignore the discussion, or even, if we’re lucky, scowl or smirk. A rare achievement in the monastic cell of the lift. That said, one can find this disconcerting in the inverse: a colleague related to me how a couple of men got in a lift and cheerily waved good-bye to a woman who remained outside the lift. As soon as the door closed, the men suddenly began a leery discussion of the myriad sexual divertissements they’d like to perform with that woman. It became more and more graphic. Fortunately, the lifts in our building traverse the 33 floors very quickly, so my colleague was not present for the denouement of their outburst.

A taboo lift-practice we’ve all performed at some time or other is the quick-close attempt: we enter a lift and hear footsteps. We want the lift to ourselves, so we jab the door-close button repeatedly. The lift reacts slightly too slowly, and the owner of the stepping feet becomes visible. He can see our hand, suspiciously near the close-button. We quickly press the open-button, as if we’ve been desperately trying to get the damn thing open for our poor, lost foot-stepper all along. “Oh, what a relief the door didn’t close before I could hold it open for you, my new deserving friend, thank heavens”, we hope we’re projecting. Our unconscious mind begins its complex simultaneous equation to align us appropriately with regard to this new interloper. The bastard.

In English, “good” is always “good”. Dogs can be good. So can bitches. You can eat a good meal, or, indeed, good meals. You can give a good man’s pilchard to a good girl’s stoat. You just slot the word “good” in, and that’s that. In German, you have to worry – or have Angst. First, you need to think about whether the noun being described is male, female or neuter, singular or plural. A different “good” could go before each one.

This is just the first of many considerations you have to make before proclaiming something as good. That’s just the beginning. Is it “a” good man or “the” good man – or is there no article at all? Yes, it makes a difference. So can we say “good” yet? No – not so fast. What case does “good” govern? In other words, is the good man the subject (“the good man ate some cheese”), the direct object (“the dog bit the good man”), the indirect object (“the taxidermist gave the tongs to the good man”) or the genitive (“the Walking Coughdrop visited the house of the good man”). You see, which “good” you use depends on these cases too. So, you have to hold in your head this monstrous flowchart/linguistic junction box, the adjective flying down the tracks, switching at each set of points, until finally, one hopes, it arrives at the correct linguistic platform. Some hope – there are 48 different possible destinations for that adjective, 48 possible linguistic slots that need to be taken account of. Just to say the word “good”. In English, we just have to remember the word “good”. In German, that’s just 1/48th of the way there.

There are lots of languages with morpholoically-realised case, with arbitrarily gendered nouns and the rest, but many have noted German’s peculiar precision in its syntax, its compoundwordaddiction and so forth. There is a way that the language slots together which, at times, out-Latins Latin. One of Mrs Trellis’s colleagues, an Italian, noted this characteristic in German when he learned it. Any Romance language speaker detects it immediately.

Now, I am intuitively suspicious of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, which suggests an intimate connection between the language we speak and our very perceptions of the world; however, one must wonder at the cultural and meta-cultural effects of this German morphologically-realised pernicketiness. What effect has it had on national character? I wonder this myself, because my brief visit to Germany confirmed that many of the national stereotypes are just that. One seemed to ring true, though: the precision demanded in all circumstances, even when informality or irrelevancy might, in an Anglophone society, render such precision near autistic. An example – one of many examples: the night-train attendant asked when we’d like breakfast served. “So spaet wie moeglich, bitte”, I replied, “As late as possible”. The attendant looked mildly horrified at the implicitness of this all and demanded a specific time be enunciated. Thence ensued a bizarre Dutch Auction, in which I named a time, he claimed that it was too late, until eventually I hit on one that seemed properly balanced for both our needs.

German precision is, of course, renowned in its philosophy, its engineering or, with IBM’s help, in darker logistical areas. There are other cultural effects: German food is “explicit”. Their appreciation of comedy is either “explicit” slapstick or precise, dry and wry. Their philosophy tries to systematise totality in a pernickety way quite alien to the English philosophical school. To speak German, one needs to follow explicit rules instinctively. Too often across German society, this acquiescence to a panoply of petty rules has been noteworthy. Dare one mention the attraction of racial Darwinism to the mindset of a conversationalist whose adjective can fall in one of 48 slots? But no, that’s unfair, unworthy of even a Basil Fawlty. These are all flabby generalisations, but beneath the wobbly tummy is something of a beating heart.

The English and German language have common ancestors. Indeed, even by late Old English, the two languages can almost be considered dialects of one another. English became less anally retentive as time went by, ditching its arbitrary genders and leaving us with only a vestigial morphologically-realised case system (“I/me” and the increasingly rare “who/whom”, for example). German, in distinction, clung on to the explicit and, to an English speaker’s mind, ridiculous extrinsic belts-and-braces redundancy. Did restrictive cultural forces hold German in its waistcoat? Did English start letting it all hang out because of the productive miscegenation of its speakers? Or, more tantalisingly, did the changes in English language spark off a greater cultural effect? In other words, is the difference between BMW and British Leyland explained, in part, by the declination of adjectives, or are those pernickety Teutonic linguistic practices just a component in the greater cultural tendency to precision?

In an interesting twist, many have noted that German’s waistcoat buttons are beginning to pop open, and that the language is starting finally to “Englishify” itself – the genitive case is almost extinct in the spoken language, and the subjunctive mood is becoming ever more restricted – although it is not quite as ghostly as in English yet. The complicated carving of German grammar is tending towards the usefully corrosive effects that have formed whorish English. Will the eventual smoothed pebble lead Mercedes Benz to create anything like the Mini Metro? Alles ist nicht klar. (It could have also been klare, or klaren, or klares, or klarem…).

My concern this time is not with the “art” (or, indeed, the arses, which weren’t bad), but with the earnest right-on claims made by one of the artists – the artist that this evening won the prize, as it happens. This is the artist whose exhibition consisted of the lean-to shack, the hydrogen-assisted bicycle, the photographs and the painting of the cactus.

His claim for the unifying theme of his work was the usual “Gaia Mother Earth Ooh Capitalism Tsk Consumes Bah Humbug Naughty Business Men” sentimental environmentalism/anti globalisation rubbish. What was particularly egregious about his brand of rubbish was his claim that his trip across some desert or other with his bicycle represented some snub to the inefficiencies of industrial capitalism. You see, his bike was powered with nothing more than hydrogen which, when it burns, produces nothing more than water. He used that water to paint the cactus, another conservative symbol of mother nature in frugal balance blah blah. People were looking at this bicycle with strapped-on canister of hydrogen and nodding sagely, in wonder at how efficient and environmentally friendly and divorced from the evils of global capital this is. Except, of course, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a trick, a lie, an idiocy easily inflicted on the scientifically illiterate arseholes who visit and judge such “art”.

You see, the curators had put up a sign saying that the hydrogen had been “taken from the desert air”. Oh, really? So the solution to our energy problems, then, is to scoop up air from desert regions and run our Happy Cars on it? All that free hydrogen that, of course, isn’t in the air. Yes, there’s lots and lots of hydrogen on this planet. Unfortunately, the reactive little devil tends to be bonded with oxygen (to produce water) and/or carbon (to produce fossil fuels). So, how do we get pure hydrogen from either of these sources? Well, in order to extricate the hydrogen atoms from their tightly promiscuous bonds, one needs to provide energy to break those bonds. Dry desert air has precious little water vapour, let alone free hydrogen. The dangly-earingged twunt who wrote the “scooped from air” sign hadn’t looked at the labelled canister. I had. It was just common-or-garden industrial hydrogen. This hydrogen would have been produced by electrolysing water, or by putting natural gas or coke through an energy inefficient conversion process. As the first law of thermodynamics makes clear, then, the artist would have wasted less energy if he’d just used a standard motorbike and run it on petrol. The picture of the cactus wouldn’t have been so pretty, admittedly.

Now, hydrogen electrolised from water via solar power, say, might have allowed him to make his point. But it wasn’t. He used standard industrial hydrogen, produced not as a part of the renewable energy cycle, but as a part of the non-renewable economy he’d thought he’d escaped: he was using the earth’s finite resources just the same, and probably creating just as much net pollution in the process. And either nobody noticed, or cared, and so allowed his little didactic lesson to pass without realising that its central premise, that which was supposed to be telling and poignant and oh so “aaaahhhh” – was, in fact, utter, total bilge. Scooped from the desert air? You stupid twat! Art? Arrgh, more like!

Like many people, I don’t usually remember my dreams. When I do recall one, it is just as I slide awake, when I seem to have a yearning to grapple its memory, as if I am about to lose something precious, as though I am compelled to play with the fading textures and other-worldy emotional modes, to linger on the darkening images and wonder at their construction from the brickabrack of my mind. As I gain consciousness, slowly but surely, that peculiarly poignant brook along the border between sleep and consciousness evaporates. Just as surely dissipates my memory of a film after the credits roll.

What remains in my consciousness for any film, then, is just what remains of any dream. Not the story, the narrative, but fractured images, scenes and the emotional seasoning. Most films, like most dreams, leave precious few of these vivid shards. The best films, like the most significant dreams, leave the greatest number of discrete scenes, shimmering in my mind, recalled like an impressionist painting, or perhaps cubist: the clinical sequence will have dissipated, but telling details and a roped-off pervading atmosphere will remain, potent and heady, each shard overlaid on the other to provide the only notion of the totality of recalled experience for that dreamy film or filmy dream.

I cannot, therefore, know whether a film has been “good” in my terms until well after I’ve seen it. If it passes through my system, like glucose syrup or a gulp of water, then it remains fundamentally unaffecting beyond the immediate pep or distraction it provides, and has failed me in some deeply mimetic way. If, days, weeks and months hence, I find the film has left a residue in my consciousness, then it has worked its benign infection, and I consider it personally worthy.

Films that I find deeply involving and enjoyable at the time of viewing can disappoint me later with their scant imprint. Trivial and silly films can surprise me just as much when an embedded splinter of the film suddenly stings without warning, months later. The collection of film shards that hangs in my internal gallery is an eclectic one: the fractured images that glitter, the morsels of emotional intensity, the distilled mise en scene pervades like a heady incense. Visitors to my confused gallery will note the throbbing nostalgia for a past that was not mine as it wafts its way through from Radio Days. Down the hall, encounter the pit-of-the-stomach delight as the synchronised denouement in Fight Club slews past. The mindboggling industrial hell of the chicks on the conveyor belt in Baraka can haunt at a moment’s notice. The Hudsucker Proxy peppers the gallery with vignettes, from the expertly crafted innocence to the monumental clockface so crucial to the film’s conclusion. The tender ambiguity of “Stay Awake” in Mary Poppins echoes the hall with a baleful intensity (the first film I ever saw – my mother tells me that when the lights came up in the house, I burst into tears).

If my mind holds a collection of such impressionistic and expressionist shards from the affective cinema, then one film alone has its own museum wing. That film is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I cannot think of a movie that has left within me a greater number of images, tropes, scenes, colours, tones, cut-class motifs and enveloping ambiguities. Never mind the film’s grandiose set-pieces, which are all there, but things like the comically grating sound of the telephones, the little office-cubicle in the Department of Records, the leering drunk over the model city, the glass-brick subways, the Stalinist architecture and the thousands of individual moments of brilliance cascade themselves to me eternally. Amidst the tumult is Michael Kamen’s score, whose shattering resonance has not, for me, been equalled in any sound track. Kamen transforms the silly little ditty behind the film’s title into something quite Mahlerian in its heroic tragedy. Almost a complete record of it resides in some deep basement of my mind’s sound archive.

Appropriately for a film that so centrally deals with the ambivalent power of imagination over mundane or painful reality, it lies like no other in my mind as the vivid dream of a film that it is. Unlike a normal dream that evaporates in the morning sun, though, its images can be replenished and its emotional stock can be re-seasoned with the insertion of a DVD.

Now, what sort of analogy am I talking about? Specifically, I would like historical examples of where a powerbase has been tempered, subverted or overturned not through Fabian-like lobbying and bourgeois “education”, but either implicitly or explicitly by using the powerbase’s own hubris to destroy itself. In particular, I am interested in examples where a powerbase’s insecurity and greed has led to a bust flush, to its overreaching itself and enacting a reductio ad absurdem. A famous example I (and, it appears, others), can think of in this context is, of course, the 18th Amendment of the American Constitution, whose instigation of Prohibition did more to destroy the Temperance movement that had craved it than any lilly-livered letter-writers and libertarians. As the author of the above link wrote, “it affirms the economic theory, which predicts that prevention of mutually beneficial exchanges fails”. If that theory is sound, and I believe it is, then encouraging a radical “prevention of mutually beneficial exchange” in one fell swoop, rather than in halting increments, is sound. Not only is it extricated from accusations of Trollhood, but is one of the most rational courses imaginable, and enshrined in economic orthodoxy.

Further to this, please send historical examples of the raising of public consciousness through the encouragement of such reductio ad absurdems, where agents specifically catalysed what they realised as the fatal hubristic flaw at the heel of a powerbase.

A powerful example, of course, is the American Civil Rights movement, of which my brother (a Historian specialising in America) has just reminded me:

“The Civil Rights movement, and the rise of white ‘Massive Resistance’ in Birmingham Alabama, with their hosepipes on little kids, strikes me, off hand, as a good example. It was completely misjudged in the TV age, and got those who were uneasy about the end of segregation for ‘practical reasons’ to side with black civil rights leaders. Indeed, the policy of direct action without violence by the civil rights movement was predicated on the hope of an over-reactive, violent police/white counter-measure. This makes the policy of ‘non-violence’ precisely about violence, given that its raison d’etre was to provoke a violent counter response, whose violence would be contrasted to the ‘lack of violence’, and lead moderates who would have supported segretationists on grounds of maintaining ’stability’ and ‘not rocking the boat’, to move to the side of the civil rights people. In other words, those who hosed the kids defeated their very aims by their actions”.

This is indeed directly analogous. Rosa Parks is the most famous single example of this principle. It was not the “production of press releases”, or “edutainment” which proved monumentally powerful: merely her sitting in the “wrong” seat on a bus, and calculating that the ludicrous official reaction would point tellingly, stingingly and devastatingly at the injustice abroad. The movement had prepared this action well in advance, and had trialled it many times before. No doubt, they would now be dubbed silly agit-prop trolls. Finally, true to form, the official reaction was just as obnoxious as had been hoped, and the rest is, literally, History. Had a proto-ORG been advising Rosa Parks, they’d have suggested contemporary equivalents of setting up a Wiki or contacting her MEP instead. Or edutaining her way through press-releases to freedom.