NEVER WALK ALONE

A writer, a poet and a singer walk into a bar. In Liverpool (53 degrees North, 2 degrees West). 

This is not a joke. This is the bar of the Rodewald Suite of the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. This is a Liverpool Irish Festival event, organised by Writing on the Wall, entitled Derry-Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West): so good they named it twice.

Walk on, walk on, 

With hope in your heart

And you'll never walk alone

This is Hope Street, which is bookended by cathedrals: The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King (Roman Catholic) and The Liverpool Anglican Cathedral (Church of England/Anglican). 

Also in the vicinity of Hope Street are a noodle bar, an hotel, a Mexican restaurant, offices, social housing, pubs, the Oratory Public Park, The Blackburne House Women's Technology and Education Centre, The Liverpool Trust for The Performing Arts (LIPA), the former Hahnemann Homoeopathic Hospital, The Everyman Theatre (under reconstruction), The Liverpool Medical Institution and the Victoria Gallery and Museum. 

And, of course, the Philharmonic Hall, with the Rodewald Suite, where the writer, the poet and the singer walk into a bar. To read/perform/sing their work.

Culture is the matter in hand and how it manifests in the first ever UK City of Culture year, 2013, in Derry Londonderry, where the majority of adult citizens vote for Irish nationalist parties.

The programme of events for the UK City of Culture year, 2013, is launched on Thursday 25th October and available at www.cityofculture2013.com/ 

The programme is varied, fascinating, complex and contested. As are all matters in public life.

The citizens of Liverpool have some experience of the hitching of culture to the wagons of economic, social and cultural  development, from the year 2008, when Liverpool was European Capital of Culture.

Derry-Londonderry, as UK City of Culture 2013, manifests very specific experiences.

A successful programme will engage with both the common and the distinctive. ... I expect the UK City of Culture to reflect these identities (Ulsterman, Ulster Scots, British), in what it delivers and I appreciate that other cultural identities that are Irish, Gaelic and many others will be included.

The people in the Rodewald Suite listen to the writer, the poet and the singer present their stories in various forms: literary, dramatic, verse, performance, song. Then they question and debate with each other. And with the writer, the poet and the singer.

What will the future be like for Derry Londonderry? Are we optimistic? Can we put The Troubles behind us? Why are we always negative? Will there be enough hotels? Can't we see the Big Picture?

There is no Big Picture. There is a gallery of pictures: small, medium and large. You need to get up close to see the human factor, in the detail. Viewed from a distance, the picture appears big, yet is inadequate to the actuality of lives lived in particular economic, social and cultural contexts. 

It is rarely a question of either/or. More usefully, and/both questions are faced. 

The beauty and the grime. The violence and the peace. The serenity and the torment. The wealth and the poverty. The turmoil and the quiet. And the many states in between. 

Everything is named twice. And more. Not only the city.

Look closely at the Hillsborough (Liverpool) and the Bloody Sunday (Derry-Londonderry) Families. Up close. In detail. A complex gallery of pictures. 

Vivifying.  Never alone. 

So good the state apologised twice. 

It is impossible - now, at this point in the long journey of human culture – to avoid the sense that pain is a necessity, that it is neither accident, nor malformation, nor malice, nor misunderstanding, that it is integral to the human character both in its inflicting and its suffering. This terrible sense tragedy alone has articulated, and will continue to articulate, and in so doing, make beautiful ...

Hold your head up high

And don't be afraid of the dark.

The News Letter: newspaper; page 8; Gregory Campbell, MP for East Londonderry; Belfast; 20.10.2012 

Death, The One and the Art of Theatre: book: Howard Barker; Routledge; Abingdon; 2005

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma3Nax8yyOE

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THE WRATH OF CATS

The announcement of over 760 job losses at FG Wilson, an engineering company, originally locally-owned, taken over by The Caterpillar Corporation, in the Larne (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) area of the north-east of Ireland, shocks citizens.

It does not shock Alastair Hamilton, CEO of Invest NI, the government-funded body charged with promoting investment in Northern Ireland. 

We're shocked at the numbers, but not about the trend. The trend is there right across the board.

John Ford's shocking film of John Steinbeck's great novel The Grapes of Wrath details the experiences of the Joad family of Oklahoma (35 degrees North, 97 degrees West), share-croppers in the early 1930s. They are driven off their meagre holding by the land-owning corporation.

Among the many shocking black and white images in the film are those of the Caterpillar bulldozers. The Cats pulverise crops, fields, roads, machinery and homesteads. 

The Cats pulverise the families that look on, aghast. Shocked to the core.

As are the families of FG Wilson staff. But not the CEO of Invest NI.

Shocked. 

If there was a law, they was workin' with maybe we could take it, but it ain't the law. They're workin' away our spirits, tryin' to make us cringe and crawl, takin' away our decency. 

Alastair Hamilton, the CEO of Invest NI,  is presented by the media as a hard-headed business man. As if this was a good thing to be.

When asked if he would have made the same decision to move some of the manufacturing to China he said: If I was in that job, in all possibility, yes.

The CEO is a free market ideologue, in a well-paid, publicly funded, government job, paid for by taxpayers, including the sacked FG Wilson staff. 

One of his tasks is to 'rebalance' the economy, which is the current euphemism for the shifting of public money into fewer and fewer private hands.

There is pressure to lower corporation tax, which amounts to an award to global corporations like Caterpillar, enabling them to coalesce and repatriate profits from a most-favourable tax environment. 

FG Wilson do exactly what the CEO of Invest NI advises manufacturing companies to do: succeed in export markets. Then Caterpillar comes in and pulverises them. They find a local competitor in FG Wilson, exporting diesel generators to markets in the east, buy them over and close them down.  

Unemployment in Northern Ireland is running at about 8.2%, the highest in the U.K.. It is even higher among young people.

The CEO of Invest NI presents no regard for the human consequences of the actions he advocates from a secure position of power and privilege. His remarks are as heartless as the treads of a Cat bulldozer.

Will there be any FG Wilson aka Caterpillar engineering workers in the north-east of Ireland in five years time?

Resist the wrath of the Cats. Don't buy the boots. Or the bulldozers. 

They trample all over families.

Moreover, these flexions are taking place every where, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:

The Grapes of Wrath: film; John Ford; Twentieth Century Fox; 1940

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-19596343

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: book; James Agee and Walker Evans; Peter Owen Limited; London; 1965

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