PANDA-SEX OBSESSION

A panda gives birth to twin cubs and we obsess.

What is it about pandas and sex? We scour the globe for mates for lone pandas. We strive to create matching pairs. We salivate, like porn-junkies, waiting for them to mate. Their coitus is a world spectacle, as fraught as a moon-landing.

Why don't we just let them get on with it?

They're endangered. Of course. But so are black-footed ferrets and bonobos and we don't pore over their sexual gropings. Is it because pandas are big and bulky and we're intrigued, as a form of perverse Attenborough-voyeurism in our obesity-damned age, about how they actually do it?

Or is it simply that pandas are, broadly-speaking, Chinese and we're all obsessed with China now? Consider the hysteria at recent falls in prices on the Chinese stock market. It is more inflamed than the hysteria around the advance of Jeremy Corbyn's temerity. TV pundits, low-rent economists, fiscal fixers and dodgy dealers tell us these are matters of huge importance.

An endangered woman sits in the waiting area of clinic 4 at Altnagelvin Hospital, the pain of illness evident on her lined face. She stares blankly at two economists acting out on the BBC TV news. It's not clear if the story is the panda births or the China stock-market collapse. She waits her turn.

Pundits tell us the Chinese economy is changing from one of production to one of consumption. The year-on-year (dread phrase) rise in economic growth is slowing, maybe even stalling. Of course it is. There is only so much natural resource and human labour you can burn up before its done.

The Chinese won't get it together. Corporations want to sell them technologies, values and practices. And then get consumers to buy their tat. Corporate shareholders don't care that millions of people have moved from rural areas to half-built cities in order to produce the over-priced digital tat their corporations flog. Now, like the pandas, the corporations, their banks and hedge-funds are playing hard to get.

There's shrinking demand, the currency is cheapened, the country people – peasants, if you don't mind – can't go back to the country to grow food, make love, have children and leisure. It's worse than the pandas. They lost the bamboo forests. The country people have lost the whole eco-caboodle; fields, rivers, lakes, mountains, ways of life and social relations. That's progress. And the great continent of Africa is next.

So what’s to be done? Straight up? Stop gambling on currencies and stocks as if they were chips in a vain casino, which is actually mostly what they are these days. If investments are only to make a bigger bang for the bucks of shareholders, without any thought for the products or the producers involved, it's like obsessing about panda sex without any consideration for their well-being or their world.

Leave the pandas alone. If they want to get into it, they will. Stop feeding them viagra-laced bamboo love-shoots. Let them feel safe and happy and they'll get it on. Wouldn't we all?

Save the quiet, safe places of the panda boudoir.

Spare us the videos and the images of glum-faced stock-market floor-traders.

Can the casino. Make love not cash.

She still waits her turn.

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SHARKS. DOLPHINS. CARS.

The sharks bask. The dolphins lope. The cars park. Across the bay.

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!

The air is serene after a storm,

The air is so fresh that it already feels like a celebration.

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!

The sea is cerulean and violet. There are bands of tungsten, pewter and aquamarine. When the sharks turn, their fins flash mercury.

The cars range aggressively, penned in rows, angled awry, bullying each other for space. They are ranks of redundant solar cells, absorbing rays uselessly. They dream of sun-stroke.

Abroad the bay, dolphins breast the still surface. News of the sighting spreads. People gather, point and wonder. A woman says “I walk this beach everyday of my life.” Her scrawny dog bows his head in mute assent.

Boats manoeuvre in the vicinity of the sharks. Still their fins flash mercury. The dolphins move off, making for the open sea, rounding the headland, looming purple, flanked with green, above them.

The waves curl quietly into surf and toddle up the beach. Toddlers shriek and toddle after them. Teenagers try their body-boards but the tide is serene. They stand about in the dripping black of their wetsuits, sleek as seals, pert as mermaids. They point at the sharks and cast their eyes in the wake of the dolphins.

Zephyrs of barbecued meat rise from rocky coves. An extended family extends across the sand, the matriarch in a deck-chair at the centre, a tartan rug across her lap, a floral hat so floppy on her head, seagulls squawk and veer away.

The blue flag rests limply against the white flag post. The ice-cream van tootles 'o sole mio' and sells 99s as luscious as nectar. The ice-cream glides down the cones. The tongues lick and relish.

Two boisterous bull terriers bounce on their leads, wrenching their captors forward. A shaggy hound, loose and on the run, snuffles through the marram grass, convinced of hidden treasure. Two Yorkshire terriers yap animosities at each other, under the deadpan gazes of their owners who seem to mouth "it's not my fella's fault.”

Snails – so spiralled, so coloured – ease up and down fronds and blades, feeling the sun roast the innards under their shells. Already the underpants that will be forgotten is nestling in a cleft in the rocks now festooned with towels, shopping bags, t-shirts, swimsuits and a raincoat that sweats to realise it is not needed today. Nearby two socks – baby-small, squirm-folded – seethe in the sunlight. The child will go home unshod and the call "where's the wean's socks?" will sound briefly.

A man and a woman walk the beach. She links her arm to his and lies in close. He offers support. In her other hand, she bears a stick, more pointer than prop. They reach an open stretch of damp, ochre sand, a canvas the sea has readied for them. The woman writes, in bold capitals, the name of her home place, 'FEAR MANACH', as resolutely as an imperialist plants a flag on a planet.

Gannets dive, Exocet-sharp, into the blue, stunning sprats too near the surface.

The cars park, angry in the sun.

Che bella cosa è na jurnata ’e sole,

n’aria serena dopo na tempesta!


Pe’ ll’aria fresca para già na festa...


Che bella cosa na jurnata ’e sole.

O Sole Mio: song; Giovanni Capurro and Eduardo di Capua; Naples; 1898

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a8e1hIcosk

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THE RELIEF OF DERRY, CITY WALLS' PARADE, 2015

A trio of blue-jacketed marshals come up the passageway of the city's defensive walls at an easy pace. Two groups of tourists are ushered to the sides by their guides. Very soon the first group of Apprentice Boys, marching behind banners of the association, appear. They are mainly middle-aged men, dressed in suits and wearing crimson collarettes. They are members of the General Committee of The Apprentice Boys of Derry. They strike solemn poses as they parade forward.

They are followed by alternating bands and lodges of Apprentice Boys, named for the foundation clubs that form the basis of this commemorative organisation in the colonised city, Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West).

Press photographers try to wave the marshals, the tourists and on-lookers out of the way, keen to get a clear image of the head of the parade as it approaches.

The marchers advance at a steady pace, climbing the slope of the walls towards Double Bastion. The first group passes, the General Committee, followed by a band, combining fifes, side-drums, cymbals, triangles and a bass drum in recognisably military formation and rhythm. The tune is high-pitched, melodious and martial. The side-drums snarl and the big drums boom. Further bands and lodges follow. The performances are stirring and frightening in equal measure. The band uniforms are Imperial Army mock-heroic, echoing the uniforms of grenadiers, dragoons, fusiliers, corps of engineers and household cavalry.

In between each band march lodges, the core groups of the Apprentice Boys, largely men aged 40 and over. The band members, including women and girls, are noticeably younger. Do male members of the bands move into the lodges as they age? And the women? The progress of the parade is steady, low-key, but never po-faced. There is the jollity of a spree on a bright morning. No alcohol is consumed. No barriers are yet erected on side-streets. They will come later. The city is functioning, if early-morning drowsy.

The parade completes the 1km circuit of the city walls, which are unbroken except for a small dip on Newmarket Street, between the civic theatre and a bookie's shop. From another vantage point, tucked up against the low wall on the inside of the walkway between Butcher Gate and Castle Gate, the bands are close. Marchers wave or nod. A number smile and say 'hello'. An MP passes and grins a greeting. Sweat glistens on the arms of the bass drummers. Their substitutes march beside them, ready to take over as the day progresses. They slap their pompom-headed drumsticks in their palms or on their thighs.

The marchers leave the walls and make for the war memorial on The Diamond. This brutalist, graphic WW1 war sculpture dominates the city's highest square. The marchers, bands and lodges encircle the memorial in quiet and good order. Wreaths are laid. The Last Post, Abide with Me, God Save the Queen are played. The mood is reverential, earnest and calm.

Then the lodges and the bands move off, in preparation for the main parade, a much larger event, involving thousands of people from outside the city and held on the streets rather than on the walls.

Police vehicles move in and officers begin erecting barriers.

Latent questions of timing, scale, civic disruption, abuse of alcohol and drinking regulations are added to existing questions of exclusion and sectarianism.

A shift from commemoration to triumph, from reverence to bawd, from an historical spectacle to an anti-social rally is underway.

http://www.apprenticeboys.co.uk

http://www.wkmfb.co.uk/events_reports/relief_of_derry_parade_-_08082015

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