Failure, Femicide and the bodies in the Fen

In the late 1980s, I got a job with the Theatre in Education company attached to The Greater Manchester Archaeological Unit. This was back in the days when public services had sufficient cash to do something creative rather than having to think of creative ways of doing stuff without any cash. The company's mission was to create plays and workshops for school children inspired by things that our bearded colleagues (applicable to archaeologists of all genders) happened to dig up. 

Something, or rather, someone whom they had dug up earlier in the '80s was Peter Marsh a.k.a Lindow Man. The GMAU didn't actually dig up Pete. That was the work of commercial peat cutters on Lindow Moss in Cheshire. (I know, not technically a fen but what you gonna do?) True to their calling, they had succeeded in cutting Pete into several pieces during his accidental exhumation. Nevertheless, the GMAU claimed Pete as their own. There followed a bit of a turf (or peat) war with the neighbouring Cheshire Archaeological Service in which sharpened trowels were drawn but the family resemblance to the GMAU Director at that time was irrefutable and Pete was claimed for Manchester. As a result, we band of strolling players were commissioned to devise a play and related workshops, suitable for primary schools, on the life and death of Pete Marsh (RIP, not that any would let him)

Looking back, this seems like a very tough ask. When archaeologists had hosed all the peat off all of Pete, they noticed that, in common with many other bog bodies, Pete had been 'thrice slain'. That's to say, he'd been stabbed, strangled and banged on the head before he was cast face down into the bog. Recounting such violent acts to primary-aged children seems inappropriate now but, in the late '80s, Manchester was a brutal place in which to live. This was before some of my fellow Irishmen had kick-started the city's regeneration by obliterating its commercial centre. Prior to this, on a night in October 1987, in my first few weeks in Manchester, Elsa Hannaway, aged 37 and a mother of six, had been kicked, beaten and raped in the park opposite where I was living. She died in hospital a few hours after she was found, lying naked on the ground, by an early morning jogger. The gruesome details of Elsa's murder were well known by everyone, both young and old, in Manchester, so talking about another killing at least 2000 years earlier seemed okay.

Although Elsa's killer has never been apprehended, ('Unsurprisingly,' say some.) her death is easily explained. Every three days in the UK, between 2009-2018, a woman was killed by a man. 'Patterns of male violence are persistent and enduring,' according to the recently published Femicide Census. Femicide, both ancient and modern, also features in the story of Pete Marsh. A year after cutting up and digging up Pete, the same peat cutter, discovered what at first he thought to be a dinosaur egg was, in fact, a decomposing human head complete with brain matter and an eye. The police were called and they immediately linked the discovery to the on-going investigation into the disappearance a few years earler of local woman, Malika de Fernandez. Her husband had been suspected of her murder but her body had not been found. When confronted with news of the pete cutter's find, Malika's husband confessed to her murder and the illegal disposal of her dismembered body around Lindow Moss. He later attempted to retract his confession when carbon dating revealed that the head had not belonged to Malika but to another woman who had been very much attached to it for approximately forty years around 210 AD. This woman became known, rather unimaginatively, as 'Lindow Woman' but, until now, has not been granted humorous and humanizing first and surnames. Therefore, hereafter, let Lindow Woman be known as Lindy Marsh or Marsha Moss. 

Whilst male violence towards women may be all too familiar and explicable in terms of deep-seated misogny, the circumstances around the murder of Pete Marsh (and all the other thrice-slain bog people) have been the subject of academic dispute. The most widely supported current theory posits that Pete was a leader whose people had judged him to have failed. As leader he may have been held responsible for a failed harvest or a sudden change in the weather. Or, if we accept that he lived around 100 AD, his leadership may have started to look rather fragile as Roman legions marching between Diva and Muncunia stopped off in the Cheshire countryside for a picnic. Such a sight may have prompted his subjects to think, 'There's a new power in town. Better bump of the old king to show where our loyalties lie'.

In 21st century Britain, our leaders face no consequences, fatal or otherwise, for failing. Instead failure appears to be rewarded. Let us consider the case of Gideon Oliver Osborne, heir apparent to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon in County Waterford and former Member of Parliament for Tatton, the consituency that includes Lindow Moss. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016, a position gifted to him by close friend, David Cameron, Gideon (aka George) failed to meet every target that he set himself. Under his leadership, UK national debt increased more than in the previous thirteen years. But, rather than being frog marched to Lindow Moss from his 'flipped' constituency home, George landed a nice little number working as a part-time advisor to the world's largest fund manager. Salary: £650,000 for one day a week. In the same year, and whilst still representing the good people of Tatton, George was also appointed editor of the Evening Standard. Straight out of Oxford, George had failed to get onto a trainee scheme with the Times and the Spectator, but, mercifully the Evening Standard was owned by a friend of a friend who conveniently overlooked George's record of failure and total lack of any journalistic experience. True to form, within George's first year as editor, the Standard reported a loss of £10 million. Losses increased each year that George was in the job, prompting him to be 'moved upstairs' in mid 2020. Once again, George has been rewarded for failure. 

Some readers of this blog (and also of the Standard, should there be any readers of that publication left following George's tenure as editor) may believe that I am picking on George unfairly. It is true. I have singled him out due to the fact he was the MP for the constituency in which Pete Marsh and Lindy Moss were unearthed. He is merely representative of our professional ruling elite who, due to their wealth and privilege, have nothing to fear from failure. This allows them to act egregiously in their own self-interest and in pursuit of their own ideological fantasies. They care nothing about the damage their greed and recklessness will cause to millions of those they represent because they will experience none of the resulting pain. They may be forced to resign from office but only obscenely paid non-exec. jobs, lecture tours and book deals await. They will not have to face justice either in an open prison or on open moorland, neither Belmarsh nor marshland will be their fate. Their crimes and failures will go unpunished and will therefore be perpetuated by those of the same background who will inevitably succeed them. 

Beyond the unaccountable Oxbridge-educated 'chumocracy' that constitutes our ruling class, there is another group of individuals whose 'crimes' are invariably punished with violence and death. Their crimes include: walking through a park alone at night, getting drunk, saying 'no', ending a relationship, wearing certain clothes, having friends or merely being a woman. The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens. For centuries, our leaders, including Pete Marsh perhaps, have failed to protect half the population from the fatal violence of the other half. This, above everything else, has been their greatest failure. 

A review of Game of Thrones: Series 8

The final series, and especially the final episode, of Game of Thrones was excellent. I know this view puts me in a minuscule minority of GOT fans and I risk being stripped of my reproduction, feather-trimmed Night's Watch cloak but, I'll say it again. The final series, and especially the final episode, of Game of Thrones was excellent. And here's why I take this view. But first, a necessary bit of preamble.

I grew up in Northern Ireland - the state that offered the blueprint for apartheid in South Africa. From its ill-conceived foundation in 1921, Northern Ireland has witnessed its fair share of violence and bloodshed. Going back even further in the annals of myth, the province of Ulster was forever at war. Five years after my birth in 1964, things really started to take off what with the Catholic minority outrageously demanding the right to vote and the opportunity to apply for jobs within the Civil Service and subsidised industries. The Troubles ran from 1969 to 1998 and, living in North Belfast, I got a front-seat view of most seasons, 1972 being a particular gore-fest.  So, I know about violence and its glorification. I know how power ( the fear of losing it and the desire for it) can make people conspire to murder their neighbours and seek vengeance for wrongs suffered in the past by their tribe. I've seen bits of people shovelled into bin bags for the crime of drinking in the wrong pub or queuing up at the wrong shop. And perhaps worse than this, I've known and loved people whose spirits danced when they heard about such events and called for more. So I know about violence and its glorification. 

But, fortunately, I also know full well the wearisome nature of violence. I know about crying in bed at night wanting it to stop, wanting not to feel in danger all the bloody time, wanting not having to be outraged by the latest massacre. Even better, I also know what it feels like when the violence stops as it did in Northern Ireland in 1998. (Punishment beatings and sectarian killings still continue but it's more of a minority sport these days, although hatred for 'the other' ('them uns' in the local parlance) still thrives in the province.) I know what trying to build a post-conflict society is like and it's boring and mundane and petty and unspectacular. 

It's no coincidence, in my view, that a great deal of GOT was filmed in post-conflict Northern Ireland (and post-conflict Croatia) because everything that I've written above can be applied to the eight seasons of the show. Let's be honest we enjoyed the violence (and nakedness) of seasons 1-7 but, by the time season 8 arrived, we were all a bit sickened by it. I couldn't revel in the gore with quite the same abandon after Stannis burnt his daughter at the stake to appease his god in Series 5. (Bonfires feature prominently in the iconography of Northern Irish sectarianism).

So what were fans expecting in Series 8 and on which the makers did not deliver? I suspect that, having lapped up the violence in previous series and now feeling a little 'icky' about that, they wanted their faith in violence restored. Like George W Bush in his reaction to the horror of 9/11, they wanted to believe that the world could be redeemed through violence. But you don't need to watch all five parts of the documentary series 'Once Upon a Time in Iraq' (even though you should) to know that violence has no redemptive power. 

I mention 9/11 because clearly the penultimate episode of season 8 wanted to evoke it. Towers tumbled and dust-covered survivors wandered aimlessly amongst the senseless devastation wrought upon their city from the air. It also called to my mind Black Friday, an episode in the 1972 season of The Troubles when the IRA set off 22 car bombs in Belfast within a period of 30 minutes. All those who visit terror upon civilian populations, Bush and Blair, Bin Laden and Stalin, the IRA and LRA, Daesh and Daenerys, all do it in the name of freedom but it never works out. Violence begets only more violence until eventually everyone gets weary of it. And then what do they do? They have a meeting. And that's where all eight seasons of GOT ended - in a meeting of the newly restored Small Council. That's where 19 seasons of The Troubles ended - an imperfect, barely-functioning assembly of former combatants where they get to talk about transport policy and hospital budgets. It's all very dull and probably not how they thought it would feel to seize the reins of power but that's how it is in post-conflict societies. 

Such a denouement doesn't make for great drama. Hence the near-universal disappointment with season 8 amongst GOT fans. They wanted fantasy and magic but they got reality because, like violence, fantasy and magic have no part in a post-conflict society. In fact, magic and fantasy, in the shape of the last surviving dragon, literally flew away in the final episode of GOT after obliterating the show's eponymous totem. Granted, Bran the Broken still has his eye-rolling supernatural powers but these have taken on a workaday nature, enhanced by (and I'm being very generous here) Issac Hempstead Wright's understated performance.  In doing away with magic at the end of the narrative, the writers of GOT followed in the tradition of Britain's highest paid and highest regarded writers. In the final scene of Harry Potter, the Vanishing Spell has been performed on magic itself. The world has become normal. The main characters see their kids off to school before getting themselves off to work. In the final act of 'The Tempest', Shakespeare's final play, Prospero gives up 'rough magic' and promises to break and bury his magic staff deep in the earth and to chuck his book of spells in the sea. Not a bad way for the greatest playwright in history to sign off and likewise the author of the world's most profitable series of books. So the writers of GOT are in good company and, I, seemingly alone in the world, applaud them for it. Violence, myth and magic have not won. The awkward, unexciting business of living one's life and getting on with one's family and colleagues - that's what's won. The Game of Thrones has yielded to the Stuff of Life.

Running Adventures in Yorkshire (Episode 2)

I won. This is not something I get to say very often, if at all, in any area of my life. I share my home with a woman who missed out on her true calling to be a Crown Court prosecutor and against whom I have not won a single argument in thirty years. In what some people might humorously describe as my ‘career’, I have a couple of jobs but I don’t pay tax. This could be because either I earn so much that I can afford to pay a firm of accountants who filter my millions back to me through a complex series of offshore tax avoidance schemes OR because I currently earn less than I did thirty years ago. The latter proposition applies.  In my sporting life, until now, I’ve never won a damn thing. A winner, I am not, but nor am I a loser. I normally finish mid-pack with the other slightly overweight grey-haired veterans. Mid-pack is not a bad place to be. In terms of our shared evolutionary history, being mid-pack meant that you may not get to sample the tastiest bits of what the front-running beasts had killed but it also meant that the hyenas would not get to feast on your innards whilst you lay looking up nonchalantly into the East African skies. Mid-pack was safe. Okay, you had to eat a nostril or an anus but at least you were alive. In the 21^st century, mid-pack translates as mediocre and I am happy to admit that I excel at mediocrity not only as a writer (self-evidently) but also as a husband and father, an employee and a runner. Recent events, however, have challenged my belief in my own running mediocrity because I WON.

The thing that I won was the Thortle-in-Mossdale Annual Village Fun Run and I won it by a country mile even though the course was only 3k or six times around the village recreation ground. The Whippet, the 11 year old local lad whom disgruntled villagers muttered would end my domination of the local Run in the Park, was a no show. Apparently, post-SATs, he had been hitting Fortnite very hard and had been unable to raise himself from a heavy night of murder and larceny in virtual reality. Therefore the victory was all mine although I shared some of the glory with my 25 year old daughter who trailed behind me in second place. Third place was a septuagenarian in jeans. The temperature on the day reached almost 30 degrees Celsius but the jeans stayed on all morning even during his free post-race massage. Besides my daughter and the denim-clad grandad, the field over which I triumphed also included several adult club runners. Fortunately for me though, they were all tethered to their tottering offspring. As I lapped them, I felt their looks of resentment burning into my sweaty back and heard them having to agree with their drooling progeny through gritted teeth, ‘Yes, that man is running very fast.’

Apart from the glory, winning the Throttle-in-Mossdale Annual Fun Run earned me nothing other than the cheap medal and the ‘goody’ bag of health-promoting literature that all competitors received. The organizers erroneously thought that the adults in the field would concede defeat to the children and had only acquired child-appropriate prizes. I would have happily accepted a Peppa Pig effigy bearing a trophy but it wasn’t offered to me. I also would have been very pleased with the Rising Star award, featuring a plastic rainbow with a grinning star face at its zenith but this too was not forthcoming neither to me or to my daughter who legitimately finished in the position of 'First Girl' in her first competitive race. Instead we were promised free Magnums (or Magna) but in a travesty of justice(cream), we never got them.

However, I did quit the field a winner. I had emerged from the middle of the pack and had come first, for the first time ever and probably never again, until next year's Throtle-in-Mossdale Annual Fun Run.