Durham Book Festival and Sunderland Literature Festival Events

Pleased to say I'm involved with two of the region's literature festivals this autumn. Kicking off with a live podcast on Saturday at Durham Town Hall, I'll be discussing Northern Poetry with friends and fellow poets, Degna Stone and John Challis. We'll be steered by Andrew McMillan (whose second collection, Playtime, I've just read and loved), the curator of the Rich Seams project whose umbrella the podcast sits beneath. The series began at the 2017 Durham Book Festival and is touring to other venues across the North, with Andrew wanting to cast new light on what it means to be a 'Northern Poet' today. Alongside reading from our own work, we'll discuss which voices might be absent or marginalised in this conversation; what it means to honour the various cultural and industrial seams of the North; and what its people and landscapes might have impressed on a poetics of northernness. I've known Degna and John through the poetry scene in Newcastle for years now (Degna was one of the founding co-editors of Butcher's Dog, a magazine we set up after meeting via New Writing North's poetry development programme, while John has been a friend from the old Trashed Organ days to his involvement now with the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.) It should be a really rich and good-humoured discussion. It takes place this coming Saturday, 14th October, at the Burlison Gallery in Durham Town Hall, 12.30-1.30pm. Tickets are £3 and available here.

Secondly, next Wednesday, 17th October, I'm co-delivering a talk for the Sunderland Literature Festival on the life and work of William Martin. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my championing of Martin, but for those who aren't, why not come along to Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens between 3 and 4pm to hear me and Graham, William's son, talk about his poetry? Bill was born in New Silksworth, to the south-west of the city, and served in the RAF in India during the Second World War, where he would come to meld a Methodist-Socialist upbringing with Eastern spirituality. He later had a career in the audiology department of Sunderland Royal Hospital while pursuing life as an artist and poet and was noted for his bardic style and rich tapestry of long poem-sequences imbued in the working-class traditions of the Durham coalfield. He is not very well known in his home city, which is a shame as his poetry, to my mind, is some of the most important to have come out of the North-East in the twentieth century. We will celebrate his life in words, images and songs next week. Tickets operate on a suggested donation basis of £3 and there's further information here.

Right, back to the PhD, on which I intend to post a detailed update soon.

Costafine Town

According to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, anemoia is ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known’. Explaining the word’s mysteriousness, the DOS invite us to ‘Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins — and live in a completely different world’.

My sense of anemoia has been kindled recently by discovering a song by a folk-rock duo from my hometown, South Shields. Splinter – aka Bill Elliott and Bobby Purvis – were signed to George Harrison’s Dark Horse label and found chart success in the 1970s. This post will try to explain what I find so endearing about their song ‘Costafine Town’. I know instinctively that it’s about more than sentimental lyrics, hand claps and key changes, but I can’t quite describe what it is that has me hitting ‘repeat’. My thoughts here partially function as notes for a poem – an extended exercise in kneading the pre-poem, referred to in an earlier post – and should not be regarded as complete or perfect.

‘Costafine Town’, a three-minute ear-worm in the style of the The Likely Lads, recounts the narrator’s conflicted feelings upon returning to his hometown. Described as being ‘too long away’ and ‘lonely’, the catabasis that the song implies is not simply resolved by ‘coming home’. Indeed, he boldly declares: ‘I wish I’d never made up my mind to stray.’ Forming the crux point between belonging and estrangement, the verb ‘stray’ is crucial to the song’s fraught melancholy. Are our primary identities shells that we necessarily outgrow? If we accumulate sufficient cultural capital, and if our education and status propel us away from those primary identities (for example, as we invariably begin mixing with more middle-class people at university – itself a status marker begetting other value systems and priorities), might we fairly feel inclined to discard them when they are no longer as valuable to the host culture? This is one of the meandering thought patterns I mull over when listening to ‘Costafine Town’, further complicated by the knowledge that the identities previously referred to – ‘working-class’, explicitly dropped in the song – are not identities I could justly pin on myself; that the Shields I knew as a kid, growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, was already post-industrial. Shipyards and mines were a vestige before I began secondary school and for as long as I can remember I’ve been happy to be funnelled through education (to the point where, PhD submission pending, I’m at the most concentrated end of that funnel) while working part-time in the knowledge economy so as to not have to use my diminutive frame to lay bricks or ‘go offshore’. I am, to use David Goodhart’s terminology, a product of the ‘anywhere’-dominated pattern of Higher Education policy post-1992, but I’m also a ‘somewhere’ who retains a huge fondness for this town, even if I do frequently roll my eyes at it. Straying, then, could be useful in combating one-dimensional feelings, such as the acute longing I detect in the song.

Wistful even from a 1974 vantage, why, listening to ‘Costafine Town’ forty-four years after its release, as a thirty-year-old man, do I sense a doubly-potent nostalgia? And is that feeling, perhaps borne of a knowledge that the band were singing about the place I’m from, albeit a few decades earlier, problematic when thinking and writing both creatively and critically about my own relationship to the region today?

Costorphine Town shown in western South Shields

First, it’s worth mentioning that the lyrics don’t actually pinpoint us to South Shields. While the title does locate an area of the town that can still be found (on Google Maps at least: see image above), it is in fact a corruption of Costorphine Town, referring to a strip of land around Holborn and Tyne Dock, gradually erased due to wartime bombardment and deindustrialisation. In reality, the lyrics of the song do little to evoke more than general Northern decay. Note the key signifiers: ‘working class’, ‘pub’, ‘hole’, ‘glass’. This could be Salford, Middlesbrough, Workington... So, Splinter, singing in 1974, were already conjuring a nostalgia for a prior time. This residual longing stems, I would argue, not from a specifically Tyneside-focused anomie, but by a subtle use of synecdoche. When we hear ‘open pub doors | Where the working class goes at night’ we think of our pub, or perhaps two or three regular haunts within close proximity. For me, this would be the Dolly Peel, Trimmer’s Arms and the Rose and Crown in west Shields. I have had a drink in one of those pubs in the last year, yet the song impels me to want to go out on Friday night, ‘whistling loud’ after my ‘4.30 shift has gone’, in ‘dirty old clothes’ drinking Scotch with my marras ’til kick-oot.

This is the simple effectiveness of the song: listeners in Benwell or Bootle will have different reference points to affix. The mood is already established, you just provide the setting. When contrasted to Ronnie Lambert’s well-known ‘Coming Home Newcastle’, a sugar-coated lament for what the poet Tim Pickard calls the ‘North-East’s greatest growth industry’,  a ‘drift south as there wasn’t any work of any kind in Newcastle [in 1973]’, a returning Geordie everyman squares the advantages of his economic migration (‘a few quick bob’) against the home comforts of ‘Brown Ale’ (‘ye can keep ye London wine’) and his mother ‘saying ‘hinny howay’’. I think ‘Costafine Town’ is a better song, but then I immediately wonder if that’s because I’m from Shields, not Newcastle further up the Tyne, and am projecting my own feelings onto the ambiance created by the music and the ‘timeless’ message conveyed by the lyrics: the wanderer returned. A peer on Twitter, himself originating in Sunderland, pointed out that, were the lyrics about Northampton, I might not harbour the same attachment. I think this is a very fair point, but still the song nags at me, begging to be written about. Or, better still, to be used as a leaping-off point. Where – or more pertinently, what – is Costafine Town now?

How might the tone of ‘Costafine Town’, a jaunty piece of pop-rock enmeshed in a time I never knew, be stripped down, sandblasted and reconfigured as meaningful comment on my present circumstances and the wider socio-economic and cultural situation of Britain in 2018? Right now, I’m not entirely certain, though I have a good inkling that it all hinges on that vagabond, ‘stray’. Terry Pratchett asks the following, which I think is relevant: ‘Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you’ve come from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.’

I intend for these thoughts to develop into a poem for the thesis. For a while now I’ve been using the working title Errata Slip for a Northern Town, but the literary quality of the conceit seems a little... worked. I think the narrative of ‘Costafine Town’, especially its inherent ambivalence (the contradiction in making up your mind to stray seems ripe for creative exploration), distils the melancholy I feel for South Shields in a nuanced way. Yes, it’s problematic to wish to reside in a sepia realm, but dipping in to it can be handy, especially if what you can bring back is a transformed perception of a present reality.

Marratide 2018

Something of a short placeholder post until later. By which I mean: until the PhD is finished. Probably.

Walked the Marratide pilgrimage, in memory of William Martin, for the third time this Saturday gone. Strange to do it on a Saturday, having done so on Sundays in 2017 and 2016. Noticeably more traffic. Thoroughfares of Durham City chocker with early evening drinkers, easing themselves in for a night on the tiles.

At The Copt Hill, near Houghton-le-Spring, 2018

I’ll say more about the walk later. For a proper summary of the 2016 walk, see this post, which I wrote at the time. A few brief points of observation or musings:

• ·        Not having Graham, Bill’s son, with us on the walk was regrettable, though due to recentl ill health, he was wise to remain at home. Graham did send us off in good spirits, however, with Easthope coffee and biscuits. I hope you’re able to join us again next time, marra!
• ·         We missed the Seven Sisters, an impressive Iron Age round barrow on top of which sit a circle of trees, framing a section of the walk which overlooks Hetton. Again, it was a shame to’ve missed these trees (image below) where last year we scattered some of Bill’s ashes. That said, the three times I’ve done the walk now there have been minor differences to the route for one reason or another.

Seven Sisters (in 2017)

• ·         Also around Hetton, before the Bogs, it was a shame to see the beginnings of a new housing development. At risk of sounding ultra-conservative about this, sight of the foundations did catalyse much discussion around land use, social housing and planning laws, which seem either absolutely static or over-zealous, and are so often stacked against those who most need to be homed. No doubt Bill would have been keen to press for more social housing, albeit in a way that didn’t further erode the precious greenbelt and beautiful open spaces of these landscapes.
• 
  

Beginnings of a housing development in Hetton. Note the wildflowers.

• ·         Pubs. The Blacksmith’s Arms in Low Pittington remains closed, though a squad of handy-looking blokes with power tools informed us of its imminent re-opening, in August. However, if The Copt Hill, 4 miles up the road, is used as a local barometer, the new Blacksmiths faces an uphill battle. The Copt Hill is the traditional first stopping point on the route, but it looks, feels and smells every inch a hostelry on death’s door. It will be sad if it shuts, but I won’t at all be surprised if we’re not parking up there for a mediocre beer next year. Near the end of the route, we stopped – for the first time ever in the history of these pilgrimages, according to Peter Armstrong – at The Gilesgate Moor Hotel on the Dragonville Industrial Estate. An animated game of dominoes was taking place as we supped lager and gathered our thoughts for the final furlong. The day was concluded with crisps and ale in The Victoria, surely Durham’s finest boozer.
• ·         The end-point. Two times out of three now our passage to Cuthbert’s shrine has been foiled, this year because of the choral evensong. So, once again, we paid our respects to the Venerable and visited the Galilee Chapel instead.

I’m speaking at an event called Living Otherwise at the Thought Foundation in Birtley on Wednesday about Bill’s life and work. Framed around the pilgrimage, I’ll discuss Bill’s concept of the Marradharma as an important way of framing international-regional dialogue between poetics and politics.

After that, I’m head down into the PhD, aiming to have a full first draft complete by autumn, with full submission coming – hopefully – in the new year.

James Kirkup Centenary Event (Also Featuring Francis Scarfe)

Kirkup (L) and Scarfe (R)

Yesterday, a small group of people gathered at The Word: National Centre for theWritten Word in South Shields to commemorate the centenary of the poet James Kirkup, and also to celebrate the poet Francis Scarfe. Born just seven years apart – Scarfe in 1911, on Stanhope Road, Kirkup in 1918, on Robertson Street – they were near contemporaries of each other whose lives, right from birth, would run parallel, though it’s not certain they ever met.

The event yesterday was a chance to remember the town’s most well-known interwar years poets and to consider their legacy on modern and contemporary poetry on the south side of the Big River (that’s the Tyne) as well as further afield.

We started by showing a short film, ‘I Love Our Town’, shot in 1972 by James Kirkup’s long-term friend, Dorothy Fleet. Made on one of Kirkup’s rare visits back to the North-East, the film is both a brilliant introduction to some of the recurring themes in Kirkup’s work and a precious glimpse into life in the town 45 years ago. Dorothy recalls plucking the courage to speak to James, who was giving a poetry reading further up the river in Newcastle’s Hancock Museum a while before the film was made. After their meeting, Kirkup suggested that Dorothy write a radio play based on extracts from his first autobiography, A Child of the Tyne. Newly-married, Dorothy admits that the project simply didn’t get done. In its place appeared the script for a cine-film: a 13-minute movie which shows Kirkup dandying around sites in South Shields, with cut-aways of street kids, feral cats and riverside traffic adding additional ambiance to Kirkup’s narrative, where he both reminisces about his childhood in the town and muses on some of its idiosyncrasies in verse. Kirkup once described South Shields as ‘the most surrealistic in Britain’, both, I suspect, as a nod to his love of the Surrealists (many of Kirkup’s poems, in the way that they conjure bizarre, metaphysical landscapes, often incongruously, are very much akin to de Chirico’s Surrealist images) and his love-hate relationship with a town whose ‘limitations’ he would tire of.

Bloodaxe, 2017

Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books, Sheila Wakefield of Red Squirrel Press, Tom Kelly and myself then each read poems from Kirkup and Scarfe’s back catalogue – all of the recited poems generously represented in Bloodaxe’s recently-published Land of Three Rivers: the Poetry of North-East England. What came across, as we jumped from Kirkup to Scarfe and back to Kirkup again, was the subtle differences in tone and voice and the way that, when brought together, two poets ostensibly writing about the same subjects can come at things in distinct ways.

During his putting together of Land of Three Rivers, Neil Astley remarked that a previously-unseen poem of Scarfe’s, ‘Tyne Dock Revisited’, had been discovered by the poet’s son, now living in Spain. Illuminating and adding to his well-known ‘Tyne Dock’ poem, which recalls the ‘shaggy mining town’ where he grew up, ‘Tyne Dock Revisited’ (published in Lo3R with earlier, undated manuscript lines) evokes the industrial atmosphere of Shields with precision and poignancy: ‘The foghorn through the briny night/The blue fog churning through the night’ (alternate line). Scarfe and Kirkup both wrote poems about the town’s knocker-up, the man tasked with rising labourers from slumber at the crack of dawn, with Astley speculating that it is entirely possible both poets were unknowingly writing about the very same man. Tom Kelly and Neil Astley further alternated between the two poets, with readings from Scarfe’s ‘The grotto’ and Kirkup’s ‘Marsden Rock’ giving a good sense of the otherworldliness of Marsden Bay, a place that has been close to my heart since I was a child.

Red Squirrel Press, 2008

Sheila Wakefield, born in County Durham, read Kirkup poems set in landscapes she knows intimately. Shorter poems about Ferryhill and Chester-le-Street (recounted as Haiku, a form Kirkup would come to adore) were set against the lyric ‘Durham Seen From The Train’, which contains the beautiful line ‘The heart imagines what the eye no longer sees.’

As well as reading original draft materials from my new sequence based on Shields Sketches, the book of illustrations by George McVay with poems selected to match by Kirkup which I first discovered while clearing out my great-grandmother’s flat in East Boldon seven years ago, I read two Kirkup poems that were geographically apt: ‘The Town Where I Was Born’, where, travelling on a ferry to North Shields, Kirkup witnesses the Tyne as the Styx; and ‘The Old Clothes Stall, South Shields Market’, a moment of empathy set against the Winter of Discontent (1978-79), where he imagines an afterlife for the ‘collier’s clogs [and] seaman’s denims’, once worn by now-‘out-of-work puppets’. Both poems are set yards from The Word, so it was especially pleasing to be able to bring to life their settings within the town’s fantastic new library, the original one on Ocean Road harbouring the many books so cherished by the adolescent Kirkup, providing the inspiration that both he and Scarfe would later kindle, going on to be revered as poets and translators in Japan and France respectively. As somebody involved in both the writing of my own collection of poems inspired by South Tyneside and as a critic interested in pre-existing work from the area, this event was both a pleasure to be involved with and an inspiration. As Scarfe’s fantastic poem ‘Miners’ has it, ‘the warmth of whose heart lights a fire in each hearth and home’ will certainly continue to glow for me as I read more about both poets and add to my own collection.

If you would like to see Dorothy’s fantastic film, there is an opportunity to do so at 10am on Monday 23^rd April at The Customs House. Marking exactly 100 years since Kirkup’s birth, the event will hopefully not be an end-point, but more a continuation of a series of markers to acknowledge the extraordinary talent and vision of a man who may have left these shores physically, but always remained in touch, through poems, letters and, just occasionally, scrambles back down to the shore.

Hub Editions, 2002

Open Letter to Professor Chris Day, Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University

Below is a now-open letter to Professor Chris Day, Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University, first sent at 11.10 am on Thursday 15^th February 2018. The framing context is the planned strike action by University and College Union (UCU) members regarding changes to their pensions. Beginning with a one-day strike next Thursday, 22^nd February, strikes will increase incrementally until week commencing 12^th March, and/or until Universities UK (UUK) agree to further rounds of talks, thus allowing UCU-striking staff to return to ordinary teaching and administrative duties.

The UCU strikes are yet to make many ripples with local or national news, despite 60 ‘pre-1992’ institutions being involved. The wider scenario surrounding the dispute is difficult to comprehend, but boils down to proposed changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) which would see the average UCU member’s annual retirement income cut by £10,000 a year.

I attended a meeting led by academics in the School of English yesterday where much of the intricacies and apparent rationale on the part of UUK for the changes were outlined. Gratifyingly, there was a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate students in attendance, testament to the bigger picture which overshadows the dispute: namely, a widespread – and growing – scepticism towards market fundamentalism pervading higher education.

Professor Day is hosting an open forum event on Friday, which I hope to attend. Having done so, and listened to his and the University Executive Board’s side of the story, I will report back. If you are a student – and not necessarily a student at one of the sixty universities taking industrial action – I would urge you to read up about an issue which, in the short-term could be hugely disruptive during the spring term, but more importantly in the long-term, could terminally wound lecturers’ ability and desire to carry out their important public roles as facilitators of knowledge exchange. My letter, in full:

Dear Chris,

I am writing out of grave concern for the current situation regarding the imminent strike action planned by UCU members. As a PhD student currently enrolled in my third year of study within the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University, I feel obliged to state my solidarity with those colleagues who have been forced into these measures as a last resort. I, like them, hope that this predicament can be resolved swiftly and fairly.

I would be grateful if you could explain what actions you and the Executive Board are taking to ameliorate the situation.

As a postgraduate researcher supported by the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership (and not – yet – I should add, a UCU member) I have nothing to gain in the short- to medium-term in supporting the strike, but as a concerned individual – one who anticipates a future career within the academy – I am deeply uncomfortable with the proposed changes to the USS pension system. If seen through, these changes would not only make my own, and many colleagues’, retirement significantly more difficult, they would fundamentally undermine our collective endeavour as committed, knowledge-sharing intellectuals who strive, in numerous ways, to improve the world and our understanding of it.

What impetus has an Early Career Researcher to pursue a vocation in which it appears his or her talent, skills and critical judgements will slowly be eroded by draconian measures borne not out of academic best practice, but apparently-arbitrarily-arrived-at projections and worst-case scenarios?

As a born and bred Sanddancer and resident of South Tyneside, I am proud to attend my local university, Newcastle, where I enjoy the benefits of excellent facilities and the expertise of myriad world-leading experts, the majority of whom are committed to scholarly practice and lifelong learning in a co-operative environment. Newcastle University really is a huge asset to the North-East, but its benefits are not strictly financial. My suspicion is that, in not supporting the UCU members’ desire for further talks with UUK, you are only exacerbating the market-driven model of Higher Education which so many young people in our region and beyond have been burdened by and which so many academics – not to mention ‘ordinary people’ – have rightly criticised.

Reading the University’s Vision and Values, it is difficult to disagree with the sentiments. However, I feel that, without your support for the UCU members who only wish to divulge their specialism and share their passion with the next generation of students, Newcastle University cannot honestly claim to be a ‘civic university with a global reputation for academic excellence’.

I look forward to your open forum event on Friday, where I hope my concerns will be allayed and my friends and peers who have elected to take such drastic moves can get back to teaching their students safe in the knowledge that they – both students and teachers – are not being taken for granted.

At risk of lecturing somebody whose academic credentials supersede my own, I would just like to leave you with the following thought. Like all great institutions, a university is comprised of mutual relationships between people striving towards common goals. The success of those institutions cannot, truly, be measured by how profitable they are, but by the support structures they put in place to enable and encourage all of their members to dream big and achieve.

Yours sincerely,

Jake Campbell.

"We're done here, chaps."

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..." View of 'archaeological graveyard', the Forum

I’ve just got back from Italy, where I spent a week with a number of other PhD students at the British School at Rome taking part in a pilot initiative to link the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership – comprising students from Newcastle, Durham and Queen’s (Belfast) Universities – with the BSR, a cultural and academic hub in the city, committed to bolstering mutually-beneficial links between the two nation-states.

This blog won’t dwell too much on the mission of the BSR, nor will it bore readers with superfluous details of the programme I took part in. Rather, I want to use this space to think aloud, as it were, about my experience as a first-time visitor to the ‘Eternal City’, carrying with me as I do the baggage of various identities: Professional North-Easterner; Poet; Creative Writing doctoral researcher; white, able-bodied male; &c.

Specifically, my intention is to use this post to dwell upon an incident which took place in the small hours of last Sunday morning—one whose symbolisms, cultural potency and ongoing political ramifications are tied indirectly with the aims and intentions of the programme and its contents; speak broadly to some of the hitherto mentioned intersectional identities; and in a roundabout way are germane to what I am beginning to term ‘Marradharmic Praxis’; that is, an International-Regional approach to poesis, extending William Martin’s search for social and spiritual equilibrium in late twentieth-century County Durham. There’s a fair chance that this won’t make an awful lot of sense immediately, but I think that’s part of the importance of sharing it. As ever, I welcome feedback, debate and the high likelihood of having to correct myself.

With apologies to Professor Helen Berry in advance, whose presentation and expertise I am about to make a hash of, I’d like to indulge retrospective interpretation of my own hastily-scribbled notes in order to frame the aforementioned ‘incident’ by situating it within a historical lineage opened up to me this last week by Helen’s fascinating presentation. This will be based on a very basic summary of a practice which gained traction in the late seventeenth-century, finding its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I am, of course, talking about The Grand Tour, excursions involving young British men (and they were nearly exclusively all men) being chaperoned through Europe to arrive in the Mediterranean, where they would encounter for themselves the great works of art and Classical antiquity which entry into elite circles of aristocracy presupposed not only knowledge of, but direct engagement with. Because of the Napoleonic Wars, travellers reached Italy via peregrinations through the Alps, arriving in and touring through cities such as Venice, Florence and Rome in order to acquire through osmosis the kinds of connoisseurship that would grant them continued access to the most exclusive echelons of society upon their return. These young men saw themselves as the inheritors of the Greek and Roman world: they were public school-educated, extremely well connected, able to afford the company of a ‘Bear Leader’ (essentially an older guide whose chief purpose was to provide the types of ‘experiences’ one could not possibly seen to be having in the Home Counties, Gosh no) and they spent a year or more tramping around the continent picking up the good tastes (and discarding the inferior ones) that would stand them well for another few decades of privileged, bourgeois conversation in landed homes across the country.

While the more lurid ‘souvenirs’ they took home with them (not to mention the ‘gifts’ they left in their wake) might be the subject of another post entirely, it is worth considering the types of artworks these boys would purchase and later hang in their country pads, cultivating the kind of mutual back-scratching that such mementos signified. This Cappricio View of Rome with the Arch of Constantine by Viviano Codazzi is typical of the Baroque style so favoured by Brits of the time. Never mind that it represents an ‘impossible view’ of Rome (something which, personally, I don’t mind: in fact, skewed truth can be a blessing for poets), clashing architectural and archaeological elements incongruously, the point was to be seen: to be regarded as a well-travelled, tasteful member of an elite club, a collector of cultural capital who would be considered by others of a similar disposition as understanding what good taste signified and how it might be used to further the status-quo. Remember, this is the era of civic virtue and codes of conduct: a top-down approach to social stratification in which the elite and educated impose on to others the mores and manners of polite society.

Viviano Coddazi's 'Impossible View', so treasured by bourgeouis Grand Tourists

The Tribuna of the Ufizzi by Johan Zoffany, showing what Robert Walpole called a montage of "troublesome boys" indulging in the behaviours alluded to above

How funny, then, several hundred years later, to be encountering the descendants of the Grand Tourists in a bar in Rome. What follows is, again, an exercise in thinking-out-loud: an attempt both to try and process what happened, sure, but a way of reaching beyond; to thinking about how class backgrounds, social status and education and experience are always present, consciously and subconsciously, in the way we conduct ourselves in public, especially on foreign soil. The etiquette(s) we selectively deploy and the way we ‘choose’ to ‘break free’ of those parameters (or not—often such practices and taboos are performed in contradictory ways) form the focal point of what follows.

To cut a long story short, and spare the reader mundane scene-setting, here is an open question: What drives a man – a white, Englishman in his mid-late twenties, to scream directly into another man’s face (a man he has never met) a Millwall Football Club chant? Now, I’ll be honest, I do not recall what the chant was in any great detail, other than that it was about Millwall, a club well-known to have historic problems with football hooliganism. The ins and outs of this are beyond my frame of reference, and I do not wish to fall into the trap of painting all of their fans with the same brush (and, by extension, all British football fans: those kinds of simple narratives have been damaging enough in the wake of, for instance, the Hillsborough disaster), but no matter how apocryphal or unsubstantiated the claims and their skewing by media bias may be, we are still talking about a football club whose support base (or its extreme factions) is known for attracting, how to put this, rowdy tendencies. If a Millwall fan reads this and thinks any of what I have just said is unfair, do please get in touch: I would hate to read a partial account of, say, South Shields or Sunderland supporters.

Anyway, this story isn’t about football, or sport per se. The man in question had doubtless consumed large quantities of alcohol and I suspect will not remember scoffing in my face, nor receiving in reply a firm but fair shove away, which I admit was coupled with an impolite version of the aphorism, ‘go forth and multiply’. If, by some magical nexus of the internet, the young man in question does somehow end up reading this, I’d be more than happy to engage with him in polite discussion about why he really ought not to repeat his actions in, say, the Bigg Market, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

I suppose I’m interested in the reasons why his fellow drinkers, who had clearly assembled much earlier in the bar to watch the first two Six Nations rugby games, rushed to interject. Let’s rewind several minutes: before Mr Millwall shouted in my face, I had politely introduced myself to one of the rugby fans while ordering a drink at the bar. His reception was frosty at best: saying that he couldn’t understand my accent. I admit: when I’ve had a drink – and, for the sake of transparency, I had definitely partaken of several strong libations by this stage in the evening – my accent does thicken, but it’s hardly impenetrable and I was not introducing myself to an Italian with no prior contextual knowledge, but to a fellow Englishman with whom I wished to make acquaintance, perhaps partake in a bit of light chit-chat about the day’s egg-chasing.

The rest of this story hardly needs telling: it’s so fraught with stereotypes that only the eye-rolling emoji need stand in as suitable response. Nevertheless, compost... Following a bit of argy-bargy – the old hand shakes at dawn and “let me buy you a drink on that daft fellow’s behalf” routine – I left the bar. It’s worth pointing out at this stage that I was with two other Northern Bridge students, who I won’t name, but were also men in their mid-late twenties who, upon entering the bar with me some half-hour earlier, had expressed similar feelings of cynicism about the group of rugby fans and their quarrelsome tag-along. I think it is worth stating this as unambiguously as possible: I certainly made hasty value judgements about the group, in an inverted snobbish kind of way, but my sense of anticipation in these scenarios is usually prescient. Cutting the meat from the fat, events culminated in a heated discussion with some pushing and shoving. Having dared question why another man, part of the group but not really privy to the initial squabble, had deemed it acceptable to stand in front of a street-sweeper making provocative gestures and generally being a menace to an Italian civil servant (no doubt on minimum wage) keeping the square we were all enjoying looking fresh, I was once again approached and provoked, the clear and loudly-articulated basis of which was incredulity at my reckless impinging on a mere matter of fun and games. Let ‘banter’ be banter? Are my virtue signals on full-beam here; do I need to dim them?

Look, I’ve been a tit in public. Only last spring, in my own capital city, I was part of a group of several thousand South Shields FC supporters, converging on Covent Garden, drinking too much and generally causing a racket. Now, I don’t wish to, and couldn’t even begin to if I tried, speak for the other few thousand Shields fans present, but I certainly didn’t interfere with any public servants that night, nor did I scream my ludicrous chants mere inches from a bystander’s face. However, sour-tasting as these actions are, their undercurrents are more malicious still. Being pushed and shoved around a bit is cause for a strong cup of tea and a moment of reflection, but I wasn’t actually hit (and, I feel the need to say this clearly and frankly, did not hit out at anybody else) and also, thank God, no Italian law enforcement personnel witnessed the scene, which could very easily have escalated in all kinds of ways had it been perceived as more than the in-some-ways-ridiculous display of macho pea-cocking that it was. However, and I’ve had a few days to process this now, something much more invidious took place. The sub-text of which was to be found in, to borrow sardonically from conference proceedings, the closing remarks: that is, the young man who elected to be diplomat-in-chief and diffuse the situation by saying to me and the other two lads, de facto, “We’re done here, chaps.”

Bunch of Saveloy Dips outside Wembley: 21st May 2017

There are many, many things I could now say, most of them unpleasant. However, in the spirit of reaching out, let me unpack that phrase, “We’re done here, chaps.” Syntactically, it constructs an interesting structural arrangement: the placing of the collective noun ‘we’ at the beginning acts as a bargaining chip: the by-line being: “We’ve all been complicit in this silly little kerfuffle, and there’s no use dwelling on things when we will never reach a solution, so let’s all be on our way.” In practice, the diplomat meant to use the first-person ‘I’, but, owing to his no doubt first-class degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), retained enough self-assurance to penetrate the lager-fuelled window of translucency sufficiently to deploy common rhetoric, thus diffusing the situation not for our benefit, but for the collective advantage of his fellow Grand Tourists. Better to call the whole thing off with a feckless admission of complicity than being pulled in front of a disciplinary hearing at Oxbridge and tainting the family name.

That’s not all. Let’s think of the meat in that proverbial sandwich: the “done here”. Shrugging off the incident as a mere hiccup in an otherwise-bountiful evening of banter, the phrase resonates so detestably for what it obscures: that is, our encounter here in this square, in which the behaviours and actions of the entitled are brought into question by the less-than-entitled, is being forcibly closed. Discourse is being shut down and there’s not a jot you can do about it, old bean. And then there’s that ‘chaps’, isn’t there? That wonderful piece of vernacular that contains all of the privileges and presences of the leisured class. “Chaps”, the diplomat might have said, “On this occasion you have been lucky: we have elected not to use physical force, not because we couldn’t, but because we are social media savvy and cannot possibly risk our names going viral in an altercation with three individuals at a lowly institution like Newcastle.” He might have gone on, “Chaps, your petty provincial concerns and academic persuasions matter nothing to our six-figure salaries, and as for the street-sweeper, push him in the Tiber and see what we care.”

Chaps, Chapettes, the Grand Tourists are alive and well and they are not about to check their privileges on the account of some measly, Northern PhD students. The problem for our Hooray compadres is that, via the academic discourses I am so heavily invested in, I can at least bring to attention the problematic nature of their conduct. I’m not naïve enough to think that, on the very slim chance one of the perpetrators reads this they will in any way change their behaviour, but it needs to be said regardless. At a time when our links with nation-states such as Italy become ever-more important, does it not behove of us to think more deeply about how we conduct ourselves; how we refract back to the (baffled) onlooking continent and world our better natures?

Perhaps, having had a week’s worth of in-depth tours of places like the Forum, the Lateran and Keats-Shelley House, by leading experts in their fields, my resentment towards the ignorant Chaps was magnified. I suspect that this could and will come across as me taking more than just one kind of moral high ground, but my time in Rome was predicated on the basis of being an amateur. Wishing to absorb and learn from art, architecture, archaeology, cuisine, language and politics, I came to Rome acknowledging the narrow-mindedness of my knowledge base on Romano-British relations, wishing to – and succeeding in – having my horizons expanded.

In our home nation, never mind in how we act when we’re ‘away’, civic discourse and politics are being eroded by buccaneering PPE graduates with little care for the ordinary person. I realise that that is quite a claim, and in some ways it is unrelated to the matter at hand, but a culture of entitlement was on display last Sunday so burly that it shudders to make me think that we are still being governed by the vestiges of those Empire-expanders.

The Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, (who, full caveat, I know little about), speaks about ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’: the former being the norms and customs coerced onto a populace using ideology; the latter being – I think? – an individual’s agency and ability to grasp those inherited narratives for transformative social change. Again, my knowledge base here is slight, so I’d welcome input from critical theorists or Gramsci scholars. Anyway, the crux surely is the “We’re done here, chaps” line as (anti)Gramscian coercion-in-action? Not prone to violence (would a rugby league fan from Warrington have chinned me on the spot?), the collective Chaps imposed extreme ideology, vis a vis learned rhetoric, to simultaneously shrug us off and expurgate themselves of any transgressions.

In my critical work on the poet William Martin, I situate his neologism, ‘Marradharma’, as an important blend term or portmanteau which might offer a useful prism through which to examine and critique the modern and contemporary region. Predominantly, I am concerned with how this term can be used as tool, or framework, in poetics, but its potential to be applied across a range of humanities and social sciences contexts is profound. As humanities scholars, we are used to seemingly-throwaway ciphers like ‘the past in the present’, but I think Marradharma offers us a very potent tool for engaging with social change from not only the ‘bottom-up’ (as its socialist ‘left’ implies), but from the ‘top-down’, too (as its religious ‘right’ suggests). The term is, of course, contestable, which is part of its excitement, but it seems to me to contain the kinds of dynamism and inclusivity that a relational poetics – indeed, a relational re-public – ought to strive for. The past was certainly on display in the present in Rome last week. In so many ways, it was a pleasure and a privilege to ‘bridge the Tiber’, to bring to bear on contemporary Rome my own discipline and field of expertise, but then have it exploded by proximity to other vastly different frames of reference within the settings of a literally palimpsestuous city.

I genuinely don’t want to end this with a sarcastic comment, and I realise that the prospect of carrying on this discourse with those who so firmly blocked it is near zero, but something deeply troubling took place on that square in Rome, and I’m saddened that it had nothing to do with a Roman or Italian—just several English lads who, through ‘common sense’, might forever remain apart.