When the lunatics hit our streets, should our streets hit back?

The story which so amused me in my last post continues to tickle my ribs.

In fact, last week’s announcement of a new godbothering initiative (where police turn a blind eye as ‘Street Angels’ pester evening revellers) was even briefly a topic for discussion in my social circle. Unlike an online discussion which revealed just how ‘streetwise’ Johnston Press readers are not (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/street-angels-help-keep-douglas-town-centre-safe-1-4614060 ), ours was a purely intellectual exercise and focused on weightier issues.

These days even the desperate shun what is still laughingly referred to as Douglas nightlife, but there is an important principle at stake here. What have things come to when you cannot ease the tensions of the working week with a quiet pint in a half-empty tavern, then take an even quieter stroll down the seafront without being harangued by some garishly hued bible-wielding thug?

Where are the police when our privacy and right to blissfully stagger about in the fresh night air are at stake?

If they really are condoning midnight muggings by tooled up Methodists and Presbyterians then just who are the gendarmerie serving? Judging from this announcement it certainly isn’t the hardworking taxpayer.

And if the island is going to the dogs - all moral values abandoned, the government and police force firmly in the pocket of unscrupulous, workshy ruffians, confidence tricksters and tax-dodgers - then is it time for we decent few to take action?

For example, often we see the bewildered coming out of churches and wonder if we should offer a word of comfort –just assure them there IS a better way, because they look so lost and miserable. The dazed and terrified looks in their innocent eyes as they stagger into the sunlight, desperately clutching empty wallets, can be heartbreaking. True, their strange predilection for pastel polyester clothing, flowery prints and startling headgear is also quite worrying, but that is a lesser problem.

Our aim would be to support those who may be fearful of the criminals and disturbed, to comfort victims and separate them from those who, through their egotism, hypocrisy or just plain wrongheadedness, are putting others at risk. And if that sounds familiar it is because, rather than going to all the trouble of calling a public meeting, forming a steering committee and working out aims and objectives, it was faster to lift them direct from the Street Angels’ own press release, then correct it.

Some would ask, “But isn’t that offensive, isn’t it intrusive on the rights and sensibilities of our fellow citizens – even if they are mentally challenged?”

Dear reader, in an age when witless, super-annuated prodnoses, armed only with junk science, get public subsidy to preach about our alleged overindulgence in any small pleasure, from alcohol to fairy cakes, such sensibilities are already under full frontal assault. So, please, no more hand wringing.

In fact, the only serious question to be settled here was what colour high-visibility jacket would one wear? We briefly considered how long the Street Angels must have spent on this before they decided on yellow.

We concluded it was an easy choice, even for them. Given how difficult it is to get the Ulster ex-pats who run local Batwit concessions into the same room as a Catholic, lime green tabards are a definite no. In turn, Day-Glo orange would be rejected if even a token Catholic presence was needed to gloss over any worries about sectarianism which might occur to the odd DHA employee (and they would be very odd, possibly even secretly nursing a three figure IQ and soon to be redundant, if it occurred to them). Pink, of course, would be right out, for reasons revealed loudly and often by leading exponents of open-minded Christianity ranging from Ian Paisley to John Sentamu to Cardinal O’Brien.

Pink it is then.

(Bangs gavel)

Now, moving swiftly on to possible corporate sponsors………

Aggressive beggar alert

I see from this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/street-angels-help-keep-douglas-town-centre-safe-1-4614060 ) that, as Douglas streets have been so safe late at night for years, the police have had to draft in troublemakers so that they can pick up enough overtime.

Think about this for a few seconds – if the police are willing to allow muddle-headed if sincere septuagenerarians to pester drunks, then the midnight streets of Douglas must be quieter than a Trappist monastery.

This nonsense has been tried before, mostly, it must be noted, in redneck backwaters of the UK where both incest and membership of the Christian Police Association is high (not that those three factors are always found together, of course – just alarmingly often). There, surveys of the relative figures for street-based violence before and after the introduction of such crackpot schemes inevitably show more disturbances and hospital visits AFTER the bible bashing started.

The funniest thing is that in some small towns there simply were no disturbances until the godbotherers started annoying people making their way home amicably enough from pubs and clubs. Perhaps the key here is that people in conservative communities might head for the pub to escape miserable puritans they have to put up with during the day, for example at work. If so, the last thing they want looming up at them after a couple of pints is that prod nosed supervisor who has been on their case all week about wearing an ‘inappropriate’ tie to the office.

This plan hasn’t appeared out of the blue, by the way. I was aware of a Broadway Baptist klingon trying to set up a ‘street pastor’ scheme five years ago, and since then, so disgruntled insiders say, there have been several approaches to the police from both Living Hell and the Batshits.

The irony is that one of their previous attempts at ‘street ministry’ so annoyed the public that it led to senior police officers being asked if the English crime of ‘aggressive begging’ (used in the UK to keep panhandling junkies way from tourists) was on the books over here. As families with small kids walking down the Prom being harangued by evangelical loons said, if threatening small kids and pensioners with hell fire isn’t demanding money with menaces, then what is?

Old hippies may also be sniggering at that acronym ‘DTCP’, which sounds very similar to ‘PCP’ – a nasty street drug in the 1970’s always associated with nutters jumping through windows, and better known as ‘Angel Dust’.

On a more serious note – who are the ‘other agencies’ so keen for the police to OK this nonsense? Not, by an odd coincidence, a certain ‘police advisory committee’ whose very membership is tightly controlled by three evangelical business figures (so convenient when you want to close down a small town for a bit of godbothering theatricality and police are needed to guide punters to the only available parking which is – oh, another coincidence – at your shopping centre)?

Thought so.

Never mind the Arts Council, I was the Dog's Bollocks

I had the wierdest experience yesterday. Don’t think I’m going to recover from it in some time.
Really got back a sense that, once in my life, I did something not just good but damn good. Excellent, a one-off, no-one else could have or has done it.
The thing is, 28 years ago in Belfast I founded a thing called Calamitous Clown Collective – a performance group that did clown shows in community centres, schools, in the street, at small town festivals…..places like that. Doesn’t sound much, except you have to know what Belfast was like at the time.
Absolute hell! Two communities who only communicated with each other to kill each other, a police force riddled with protestant paramilitaries and a death squad operating with state impunity to assassinate political undesirables, no law and order on the estates except that dealt out by the Provies or the UDA….
..and somewhere in this mess kids were trying to grow up and parents wanted that to happen without them being too screwed up, which wasn’t going to happen in schools and an education service run totally on sectarian lines - as was access to most government jobs, while outside the public sector were simply no jobs at all.
I was working there with an arts group that somehow did work on both sides of the sectarian divide. We’d ask kids ‘What do you want to do’, and ineviably they’d answer ‘This is Belfast, you can’t do anything’. So one day I got pissed off and said ‘OK, if you can’t do anything, let’s try the maddest, most outrageous thing we can, and if we fail, doesn’t matter cos you can’t do anything anyway but we still had the best laugh trying…’
And one kid said, ‘well, you couldn’t put on a circus show in Divis Flats’ ……and next Christmas we did, and we went on performing all round Ireland.
Which pissed off serious art bores somewhat, because the style of clowning we did was faster, louder, fuller on than anything anyone had ever seen ....... anywhere….. ever! Street kids from the Falls and Sandy Row with all the black humour you develop from those places, really going for it. Not so much Marcel Marceau or those baggy pants saddoes in the proper circus, more like Chaplin on speed performed by the Sex Pistols or Motorhead.
Wow, the English ‘alternative theatre’ types and the Dublin mime mafiosi hated it – almost as much as kids and Northern Ireland’s hardcore punk community loved it. We could, and did, blow anything else the ‘proper’ arts and theatre community could produce off stage.
There’s one BBC Northern Ireland TV clip I’d kill to see again. A TV producer and the manager of the Undertones put on a street festival in Belfast – mostly punk bands, and the Arts Council tried to hijack it. Welfare State International – then the UK’s leading cutting edge dangerous ‘alternative theatre troupe’ (at least to Guardian readers) were putting on some big performance in Botanical Gardens, and came marching down the street with their ‘rather droll’ version of a clown brass band just as the cameras were about to roll on our show. The entire street went silent, seething as WSI honked and bashed their way past, for all the world like an STD at an orgy.
I was fuming, more wound up than usual at their cheek, so as they passed the crowd and got to the top of the street I flew on stage and yelled ‘Never mind the Arts Council, we’re the Bollocks' as we went storming into our act. That street erupted like a riot kicking off.
Fecks sake, this was 'only' a clown show. Small kids fidget and get bored at the clown rich parents book for a birthday party. But here were hundreds of not just small kids but grown adults pushing each other - and even armed coppers - out of the way to get closer to the stage. I'd been at quieter Clash gigs than this!
And a year later it was all over – for me anyway. I had an accident performing, plus other heavy stuff happened and I had to give it all up, move away.
I knew the show went on. I knew some of the guys in 1985 put together something called Belfast Community Circus, which evolved, got serious and is now teaching circus arts to folk all around Europe, but I lost contact and never had a part in it.
Then yesterday at Peel Carnival some Northern Irish street performers looked strangely familiar. I recognised the full-on aggressive style, the dramatic build-up of the tricks, even my old bed of nails. It was like it must be for errant parents seeing a kid you were parted from at birth, fostered, all grown up and doing stuff to make you proud, without even knowing you.
I’m boasting, but I don’t care. I MADE that, I brought it to life and it brought joy to others. Seeing that one good thing from my distant past – almost forgotten, made me realise I neeedn’t care about all the petty crap going on around me, needn’t be dragged down by all the nonsense jobs and halfwit employers I must endure for the foreseeable future to look after my family. Because just once I created something so unique, so great, that no-one else could have done it. And it’s still excellent, still bringing nothing but joy to those who do it or experience it.
My Mona Lisa, my punk as fuck Sistine Chapel.
Never mind the Arts Council. Never mind anything. Yesterday was the dog’s bollocks.