Simple life.

I found myself watching my good friend Laura’s ‘pin-up vicar’ again this week. Peter Owen-Jones. There is something very comforting about this chap.

It’s not simply his calm, almost langourous air, it’s actually something to do with his earnest kind of mis-placedness. He doesn’t seem to completely fit in this world, and he half knows it. And only half knowing it seems to keep him half searching for something.

His latest three-part doc, How to lead a simple life, is a fairly mis-placed-seeming affair itself. It’s almost like three hours of extras, for fans who really wanted to find out more about the charming, interesting chap who went Around the world in 80 faiths, being hardly structured narratively at all. It’s almost a video diary of this Sussex C of E minister, bimbling about a little haphazzardly, having a stab at living like Francis of Assisi in the home counties. You can imagine the incongruity of this. Especially with a film crew in tow.

You could argue glibly that villages in the sumptuous Downs are actually kind of cloistered themselves – from the real bits of Britain.

Rural parts of the UK can seem like sacred spaces set apart from urban realities and the most cosy of places to attempt to give up the cloying anesthetics of money and consumer sustenance. And sure enough, Reverend O-J has to rely on the steadiness of his parishioners’ incomes in order for him to hand away his wallet. They all turn out to be kindly local community members, able to spare their barmy vicar lifts, chickens, lamb, walnuts or cakes. It didn’t exactly blow wide open the Vicar of Dibley myth of the countryside, or expose the poverty and hardship of many rural livelyhoods. And it wasn’t attempting to.

Ultimately, it was one of the many bleedin-obvious component parts of the average 21st century life that made the wheels come off. When push came to shove, the three-parish vicar’s down-at-heel Vauxhall Astra would have been towed had he not caved in at MOT time and reached for the plastic, renouncing his vow of fiscal abstinence. Dropping a few walnuts in a wheel trim were not to be enough. The experiment could not have lasted for ever.

And you can imagine the cynicism of many commentators afterwards.

Yet there it was; the comfort. Watching this ex ad-man ask fundamental questions, apparently naiive questions, about how the modern world makes us feel and think was oddly encouraging. If you were watching for it, he unearthed some simple but profound truths – about how much we need to rely on each other. Giving and sharing, needing and admitting, spending time, inspiring kindness in eachother… profound human life-givers of behaviour that seem as relevant to us as at any time that Franciscan orders have practiced austerity to highlight them.

Prophetic living, I think.

—

Don’t you wish you could get off? The pressure to be obviously good at something, to keep your lifestyle in its best shape, to reach that bit further. Cliches of modern living that still seem to smother us with a subtle kind of fear.

We’re looking for a new place to live at the moment, and this seems particularly relevant. On the one hand, a home is a tool – for helping others, and for recouperating yourself, to keep in shape to be of use out there somewhere. On the other, a home is a thing you can’t properly afford.

—

Momo keeps me at that grindstone, even as it appears to offer me an alternative. It’s not hard to feel busy or to feel fullfilled by a varied-looking itinerary in the studio. I love it. But if you are as concerned about your portfolio as I am, you can end up working very hard for little more than vanity. I don’t remember renouncing money officially. But some jobs are too good to turn down, even though their budgets look decidedly Franciscan.

That portfolio might feed your soul, but it can clog it up too. Straining to do the next good thing. I’d like to give up on it and go get an easy, dull, regularly-paid job. Wouldn’t you? Something with an obvious point and an obvious reward. Something simpler.

For, fitting in is the truly simple life.

And I’d quite like to.

—

The question we all have to answer periodically is: am I wasting my time? Is this thing I’m toiling at worthwhile? Because, it had better be.

I like to imagine that with some things, it’s still too soon to tell. That way, you can keep having a go until someone blatantly screams at you that you’re an idiot. I am still waiting for someone to do this to me, in manner of Mogatu to Derek Zoolander.

Until this happens, however, I am likely to keep going. Like the charming, comforting Rev Peter Owen-Jones. Searching and trying and looking a little lost, but still having a go.

You never know when you might suddenly, like some old prophet, barking in the wilderness, have some crumb of encouragement brought to you by the birds.

—

“Momo is shortlisted for the Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip Great Britain remix competition”

The dark celebrity barge.

There is something darkly positive about the UK election result. It actually reflects something of what’s going on in the country – confusion. And dissatisfaction.

Something openly negative about the UK election result is that I have rediscovered my prejudicial, biased, reactionary old anti-Tory self. I thought it dead. De-evolved. A childish past. Turns out it might be a childish future.

I’m not proud of it. It’s not pretty. I am a neanderthal Liberal after all. Hoorah to Ya Boo politics.

..And >pthllpppthllpppthllpppthllpp< to all you fat Tory swines with your snouts in the trough of the poor working man, shouting for more baby to go with your venison. Boo yeah. If you wanna be da man, prepare to have it stuck to you.

Yes. Welcome to tonight’s edition of You’re Not Helping.

—

Anyway, the pressure is – to understate it just a yellow smidge – on Nick Clegg.

What can he do? Electoral reform is actually on the table. Lots of tables. It’s now or never, Nick. But how could he persuade the Conservatives to go near it?

Can we get a new Britain out of this exciting mess? Or just the same old long, brown, slow-moving British politics?

I think a nation of cynics knows. But for a weekend at least, this mess created a breath of fresh air.

Read Armando Iannucci’s take on election night, including the symbolism of a power-less BBC barge full of celebrities.

Well hung.

“This election has been the most exciting since we first had the idea of doing one on the moon in disco costumes.”

Or something.

People have been telling me for three weeks now, mainly through the famously level-headed, objective medium of the telly box, that the UK’s 2010 general election has been the most exciting in a generation / since records began / since [see above]. But ever since Cleggmania hit after the first ‘x’ factor debate and everyone claimed to be suddenly so ‘excited’ by the pedantic pantomimes of the square mile, I have held my nerve on getting worked up myself.

What I will say by now, at 1.40am, alone here on the sofa with the BBC News Eternal Election Coverage, is that it does feel like we’re facing an unknown. And facing an unknown is a reasonably definitive scenario for some sort of excitement.

I guess. If you like staring into an abyss.

—

Brown has just given his acceptance speech in his constituency, returned to him again as a place that wants him to represent them in Westminster. He is still an MP tonight. But his speech sounded a little like it was accepting, at last, something more. An end, not a beginning. It seemed sad.

And by that I mean something genuine. Some real bit of emotion or meaning detectable there in that scene.

And this reminds me why I’ve kept my own emotional powder dry while following the political circus. The issues that unite the UK at the moment are all too real, rather like Gordon’s brave face – the future of our economic stability is as sobering as modern peace-time gets, perhaps. As I type, the American markets are crashing in fear of a domino collapse of confidence in major European states. Greece is the word on Wall Street, even as the streets of Athens are full of protesters and tear gas. The bond markets here are open now. Now, 1.30am. That’s pretty serious, I think.

An election campaign is, however, a big show. A dance, painfully over-choreographed and rehearsed. And it’s no dance-off between competing candidates – it’s a tango between politics and the media.

They’re like mad dogs howling at each other. Getting each other all worked up and over-excited. Hyperbole and overstatement and over-simplification are the only rules of the game. An obvious game that almost everyone in the country is not invited to. We are simply expected to watch and, I guess, be entertained. Lucky us.

Given that this particular high-point in the game happens only every five years, you can see how feverish and primed and droolingly anticipatory the news agencies are before anything’s even started. Their highly-amplified, super-sensitive mics are thrust in all directions, ready to make earwigs and flowers sound deafening.

These two world views do not go together; the real and the plastic. And I think it’s been especially obvious to everyone this time.

Which has, in turn, given me my own sort of duality as I watch it – I am feeling both a bit depressed and a bit elated by it.

—

As I’ve watched the coverage, it’s struck me that there are two main forces at work on us, the UK electorate, in this election.

One is the long-developing fact that politics in this country have converged somewhere near the middle of the spectrum. The other is that politicians are so versed in message manipulation and the sacred rule book of How Voters Like You To Talk To Them, that they all act and sound the same.

Together, these factors render our politics and politicians passingly indistinguishable. At least to those of us only showing periodic interest in the political circus rather than obsessing over the minutiae of it all like love-lorn nerds. Which is just about everyone outside Westminster.

Journalists and politicians alike seem to be especially out of touch with the rest of us on this. They all seem unable to stop the language and the moves of the game, supposing they do actually even notice that almost everyone else in Britain Does Not Give A Shit.

The net result for the gameplay is that the politicians are forced to bicker over any points of difference they can find. Like fighting over scraps of food. It’s almost pitiful. And the media fill our screens with tedious details. WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT LABOUR INHERITED IN 1997 NOW?

That’s the depressing bit. In a weird sort of way, though, the obviousness of this irrelevance to the rest of us might be what’s making me feel distantly hopeful.

It’s like the politicians are all blah-ing away emptily, somewhere in the midrange, while the sobering breadth of the country’s thoughtful mood is expansive enough to make the scuffle of tumbleweed seem a fuller sound.

The tragedy of Gordon Brown trying to smile is painfully obvious to everyone. We don’t want him to try to bend his bulk around that BS. We like a grumpy sod, if he’s truly being himself and if he also appears to know what he’s doing. Shouldn’t his spin doctors know this?

I’ve shouted at the screen many times in the last fortnight “Stop smiling, all of you. Stop talking to me personally down the lens. Stop obeying the public speaking rule book. STOP AGREEING WITH ME. SOMEBODY TELL ME TO F*** OFF!”

But the thing is, really and truly, I’ve been watching three men who are sort of being themselves. Going through the motions of the game to do their job. I don’t see any villains there behind those three podiums. I see a few behind them, of course. But I think the three party leaders are secretly as daunted as we are. And maybe that’s kind of unifying.

Oh dear. Are things so bad that that seems like a positive to me now? That we’re all clueless? Sheesh.

—

But the reality of the country’s circumstances seems to have lead to so much turn-out today, that all over the country people have been locked out of polling stations, queuing up until 10.00pm when they legally had to shut. Putting aside the fact that we really should have gotten our backsides out of bed earlier, it’s a heartening picture of Britain taking part again. People actually want to vote.

Extraordinary as a result is the possibility of a hung parliament. The markets are mooted to be scared of this, heightening the sense of impending doom. But I think this would be an honest result. We all had our say and showed that no-one won our mandate sufficiently. That’s democracy. That’s us telling the politicians what we think.

That’s us screwing ourselves, probably. But hey.

—

What I think is what I’ve always thought. I’ve been on the losing yellow team my whole life. The nice but uncool lot. I’m a liberal. I love the word and hate the fact that so many good people are scared of it. I voted Lib Dem.

Upping the basic rate of income tax to £10,000, for example, to me seems like a bold move towards getting people working again. Not renewing Trident would honestly make me nervous as a PM – a certain amount of swagger is what leadership needs behind it – but it’s probably the gutsy-wise thing that needs doing in our defense strategy. Investing in science and green economies are surely essential to building a sustainably strong future Britain, and no-one seems to have been championing this more. And trying to take a practical, realistic look at our current state of immigration is what it will take to actually sort it out. Tub-thumping jingoism isn’t enough.

What will a Tory government do to local services? Are we really ready to have a right-wing government in again? Thatcher made more of us rich and dragged the UK out of the post-war dark ages. But she did it by selling our soul and tearing the heart out of the UK community. We are still reaping the chaos of this now, even as we spend more on Amazon.

And Labour? Surely so many good-intended things turned sour alarmingly fast. Accountability and measurability became the scourge of modern working – target culture. The inhuman hell of it for teachers, doctors, policemen. Slavery to the word Choice is driving us all mad with selfishness, being fed into our children’s lives – “what do YOU want my darling three-year-old?” And can-do, make-a-change decisiveness lead to reams of poorly-thought-out legislation and a wildly monitored, control-freaked high street.

We need some properly fresh thinking. And here’s an interesting testimony: Lib Dem support is geographically evenly spread, much more than the traditional Labour and Conservative heartlands. The clear implication being that many of their ideas make sense wherever you are. Whoever you are.

Holy crap in a breadmaker, do we badly need some of that right now.

—

No party podium pumping for me, though. The Liberals have been a bickering, petty lot too often. And party politics is a donkey. But it’s what we have to work with.
Whoever can manifesto it up, what we need is a society that creates, sustains and defends freedom.

Freedom to fly as high as you want to – or not. Freedom to be vulnerable – because we understand it is fundamental to being human. The freedom to be you – and to choose to contribute all you are to those around you. Little or much.

We need a culture that believes that anyone can make more of themselves and anyone can really f**k up. We have to plan around these two possibilities.

The only way to do this, I think, is to build a society that inculcates responsibility; I must defend the right of the person next to me to be who he or she wants to be because I recognise that I need them. Nature’s great survival secret is diversity. But the person next to me has no rights – only those I bestow upon him or her. Only those we fight together to defend, through education, art and building a joint identity.

—
In the end though, have we chickened out of change? Been typically British?

I don’t know. I know what I’m feeling increasingly as I prepare to go to bed; no-one can call it yet. No-one seems to know where this night is going. And as I consider the very real possibility of a hung parliament, I think we would be doing democracy well in its event.

And I think that gets me feeling a little excited. Even as we stare into the unknown.