If London is calling, you better hang up (then bolt the doors, hide the children and board up the windows)

The US is paralyzed by vitriolic party politics, the world economy is circling the drain and gangs of thugs have set London aflame.  The fourth horseman should be on his way any day now.

As is often the case I was out of town when shit started getting real.  My dingy hotel room in Copenhagen had no Internet so I was forced to glean what little information I could from the microscopic screen on my Blackberry.  Even at such a reduced size it was readily apparent from the outset that the mob was ruling.  Cops in riot gear were being routed by hoddies hurling rocks, terrified shoppers were barricading themselves into toilets and black smoke rose high above burning shops, homes and police cars.

At first I was somewhat amused and even sympathetic.  After all, like big cities everywhere London has a large number of disenfranchised residents living on the margins and one of their own was blown away by a bunch of armed cops.  Maybe it’s payback time.  However it quickly became clear that this unrest wasn’t politically motivated.  Yes, the spark that set it off came from a small demonstration against the killing but what has followed has lacked any clear rational except avarice and blind greed.

One must only look at the types of shops being targeted and the clear organization behind the looting to see that what we are experiencing is a systematic smash and grab operation perpetrated by opportunistic thugs.  London gangs, the same ones that hold entire boroughs hostage with their omnipresent turf wars, set aside their differences for a free-for-all of ultra-violence organized, ironically, using the preferred tool of white-collar criminals, the Blackberry. 

Take for example one participant interviewed by The International Herald Tribune.  19 years old, lives on a council estate, only learned to read three years ago, never had a job, doesn’t go to school, lives on Job-Seeker’s allowance, and spends each and every day at home watching telly.  He saw what was happening and thought he best go and  “...get my penny's worth!” and joined the mob.  He feels somewhat morally superior to his compatriots because he “only” stole a £120 jumper.  He says he wants a job and then whines that, “No one will give me a chance.”  Yeah, funny that.

Did society fail this kid?  Probably, but he has equally failed society.  

A friend of mine equated the rioters with Palestinians being brutalized by Israel and felt that what is happening in London is just the beginning of a larger upheaval.  She spoke of the frustrations of being trapped in poverty while surrounded by wealth and urged me to revisit Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  While I love my friend dearly and hold her opinions in high regard I am disinclined to agree with her assessment.

Firstly, there is an ocean of difference between a nation of people being deliberately deprived of liberty by an oppressive regime and London street gangs.  Last time I checked the UK is still nominally a liberal democracy, albeit one with low social mobility and there is still a huge social safety net of programs available to move people out of poverty and protect the most vulnerable.  Sure the systems are far from perfect but income disparity in and of itself is no justification for burning the local news agent's shop.

I would like to know exactly where on Maslow's ladder you would have to be in order for your desires for mobile phones and televisions to outweigh your needs for food and shelter. Those fuckers weren't stealing to feed their families, they were stealing because they are greedy yobs with feelings of entitlement.  

Nor were they taking to the streets to overthrow an evil dictatorship or stop a war or save public access to higher education.  There are causes so dear that the only Right and Good option is to man the barricades.  If I saw even a hint of that, or sensed that there was something deeper at work here other than mindless wanton carnage, then I would grab my arm-band and gas mask and be out there too.

Lacking any evidence to the contrary, I am compelled to agree with the assessment of this shop owner that these savages are nothing more than feral rats- an appropriate and wonderfully evocative phrase that I am already over using. 

I may be turning into a misanthrope but at least I am a selective one.

Nowhere man

Bakerloo line. 9:15AM and already the tube is brutally hot. I'm sitting in the last seat of the last car. Across from me is a pretty rough looking dude sprawled over two seats. I have my earplugs in and am doing my best to ignore the existence of the universe.

The doors open, people get on, the doors close. Our carriage fills up rapidly with each passing stop; there are only two seats remaining- one next to me and one next to the transient guy. A fairly hot blond gets on, looks at the empty seat next to me; looks at the empty seat next to my friend across the way, looks at us both and sits down next to him.

More people crowd on and still no one sits next to me. I squeeze up against the bulkhead and try and look friendly- no one even glances at my seat. At one point I have people standing in front of me but no one will sit down.

At this point I would like to say something like, "and then I noticed that there was a huge mound of melting ice cream on the seat next to me" but that wasn't the case. The seat was fine, padded and inviting.

It made me think of Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere in which the characters who have dropped out and fallen through the cracks of society live in a shadow world which runs alongside the real. They were there, just outside the edge of our vision, standing behind us in the Post Office queue, next to us as we walk home from the pub, late, cold under the yellow streetlight.

There I was, one of them, the forgotten, the misplaced, the ignored. Somebody else's problem- taking up space, two spaces in fact, but not a presence in any tangible sense. Only a vague perception behind the eyes of "no, not there, that seat is not vacant but I can't really tell why."

Edgeware Road. Baker Street. Oxford Circus. On and off go the businessmen, the shop assistants, the lads in their football colours; I sit in my private state of mind and watch from a very great distance.

Charing Cross, my stop, I stand and knock a woman with my bag. "Sorry" I say. She looks up at me and says, "no problem" and goes back to reading her book. I step off the train feeling much relieved.

It Does Start to Blur After a While

Climbing back up to that 35,000 foot motorway above the clouds. The moon, seriously full on the trip out, has waned only slightly in the intervening days. On night flights they dim the cabin lights during takeoff and landing. For my money (or in this case, the company’s money), on nights like this they could keep the interior lights off for the entire journey. There are mountains up here, vaporous though they may be, which assume an entirely new vision of loveliness under a stark white moon. This panorama is obliterated completely by the pizza-parlour lighting from the inside of an Airbus.

My band of merry men and I have been spending quite a bit of time in Germany as of late. Outside the UK, Germany is our company’s largest European market. Lots of good consumers in Deutschland, despite their anachronistic policy of closing all shops on Sundays. If you find yourself famished in Hamburg on Sunday and your fridge contains two packets of mustard and a jar of expired mayonnaise, you’re pretty much fucked. You might find a few petrol stations open but those hotdogs have been twirling on their little circular runs since at least last Spring so the smart money would be on giving them a miss.

In past posts I have raged against stereotyping entire cultures based on individual behaviour or idiosyncrasies. The US is not filled to the brim with gun-toting, slack-jawed, rednecks named Bubba-Billy-Bob (a full 49% do not fall into that category) and although popular reality TV shows might lead viewers to believe otherwise, not all the English are Chaves. Likewise I am not going to pigeon-hole all of Germany based on my experiences with a handful of IT geeks- I’ll leave that up to you.

I’m one of those cowboy-type IT guys who pretty much makes it up as I go along. Sure, I’ve done a lot of project management stuff with wall-sized charts, graphs and Post-it notes but at the end of the day I’m the guy they pay to make it work- no matter what -and I better not think about getting on the plane back to London unless the Finance Director from whatever remote outpost I’ve been working in is so happy he shits rose pedals.

Working alongside my German colleagues has been, continues to be, an enlightening experience. They take nothing for granted, trust no procedure unless it has been demonstrated to them and consider anything less than complete success a dismal failure. They like plans and structure and are uncomfortable when things deviate from what’s on their worksheets.

Since I’ve been doing these rollouts for over two years I have become a bit, shall we say, complacent about the process. One site visit, a couple of days of prep work and one weekend to migrate usually does the trick. When things go wrong, and they always do, we’re there to make it all better. We get the place running and hand off to Core Services for on-going support. We don’t have the time to baby-sit because come Monday night, we’re off to our next job. My boys and I are fixers and like smoke-jumpers everywhere we take huge, chest-expanding pride in the job we do.

Looking at these two very divergent attitudes, one might think that there would arise a good deal of friction between the teams. In reality, we complement each other fairly well. They force us to be more precise and process driven and for our part we bring to the party an aptitude for adaptation and think-on-your-feet cleverness. It’s up to me to make sure everyone plays nice, catch the flack and push things along. It is almost, but not completely, like herding cats.

Fast forward.

It’s been months since I have been to Paris and I can’t say I have really missed it. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Paris as a place to holiday: the food is great, the shops are lovely and there are no end of little streets to explore. Unfortunately I have spent far too much time working in the suburbs of Paris in offices that have Neanderthal IT infrastructures and appallingly rude employees who smoke at their desks and throw their laptops if they don’t get their way. Experiences such as these knocked the stuffing out of the joy I once felt whenever I arrived at The City of Lights.

Added to my justifiable trepidation is the fact that I have just had the extremely unfortunate experience of catching the Eurostar from its new domicile at St. Pancras. On November 14th the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo was closed and moved to the refurbished St. Pancras station. The retrofit cost more than the GDP of Africa and provides a direct high-speed link to Paris. Trains from Waterloo travelled on the conventional, slower, tracks on the English side before speeding up once they got into France. It took the British 11 years to install their high-speed line while the French had their tracks ready nearly as soon as the last scoop of earth was removed from the Chunnel.

The upshot of all this upheaval has been to transform a dingy 19th station into a soulless 21st century station- and save 20 min on the journey time to Paris and Brussels. Ken Livingstone, the Lord Mayor of London, recently asked “why would anyone fly to Paris anymore?” Allow me to tell you: St. Pancras is a bloody nightmare. Let’s hope it’s still a work in progress because if this is a finished product Eurostar is doomed.

There is no doubt they increased the space available but whomever they got to allocate that space must be one for hard nights on the town. They created a huge ticket counter but reduced the number of automatic ticket machines. They spaced out security and passport control but since there seems to be less staff available it takes longer to get through. The lounge hasn’t been built yet so they put up a curtain around a bunch of garden chairs and shoved us all in there. Outside in cattle class they also have fewer seats with backs and have littered the area with a bunch of padded benches. They changed our gate assignment three times and the rush to the trains was only slightly less frantic than a rugby scrum. The signage is minimal and placed exactly where it is least visible. In short, in every conceivable way they have managed to transform the reasonably pleasant and hassle-free experience of boarding a train at Waterloo into a painful, dehumanizing and loathsome enterprise. Well done!

Even 1st class can’t save this trip. They didn’t put on enough food, the train is standing-room-only and as usual the loos have gone beyond filthy into a realm of wretchedness only approached by open sewers or Edgware Road kebab shops.

We’re coming up to Paris now and the world outside my window has descended into darkness. The transport strike is over now but several of the more disenfranchised suburbs are burning. For the French, this is the sort of equilibrium that allows them to simultaneously feel good and miserable and makes for good conversations over wine.

Four days later and I’m outbound from Paris. The train is much less crowded and they actually put on enough food for everyone. A pod of art dealers is sitting across from me; we’ve been chatting about their most recent acquisition- a small rectangular cast of St. Sebastian having his wounds attended by women. It’s a bit of an odd piece of a type generally created for nunneries. As an 18th century work it’s a bit past my normal area of expertise and taste but it does have a delicate charm. They sank into a heated debate about the volatility of the contemporary art market so I bowed out to try and put a ribbon around this entry.

Between now and the end of the year we have to finish up three more German sites, attend a staggering array of office parties and beg The Powers That Be for the money to keep my boys and I in nice hotels for a few months longer. We all know that sooner or later the golden tap of funding is going to be turned off and eventually we will have to return to more conventional jobs or unemployment. After two and a half years of this gig, the thought of riding a desk again makes the bile rise into my mouth.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. At the agency I used to work at they lost one of their only clients and offered voluntary redundancy to the entire staff. 43 took them up on it even though they only really needed 20 to fall on their swords. 43 out of 180 people decided that a payoff and the dole queue was preferable to sitting in a glass box staring at glowing monitors all day while their souls were slowly sucked from their bodies through their asses.

This gives me hope. No one who works in advertising, media, PR or any similar occupation should ever take their jobs seriously. Trust me on this, if the entire industry were to vanish tomorrow the only thing the huddled masses would notice, apart from a gigantic sucking sound, would be that they can now watch their favourite TV shows without being interrupted by people with perfect teeth making them feel inadequate about their choices in underarm deodorant.

We just cleared the channel tunnel. From this point it used to take about an hour to reach central London- they’ve cut that time in half, which is a nice trick even if we do have to go to the wretched St. Pancras. I’ll spare you a repeat of my tirade against Eurostar’s new London home and instead pass along a snippet of conversation I overheard at a dinner party: “St. Pancras might be pretty but I liked making the French arrive at Waterloo.” Some things never change.

I Did This to Myself

Brussels. I shouldn’t be in Brussels, I should be in London. I’m in Brussels because a massive power failure rendered all international rail transport out of Amsterdam useless. I have been lied to in four different languages and squashed nose to armpit on a train that, it turns out, I didn’t need to get on.

The blame for my current mess rests fully on my slumping shoulders. I deliberately chose to take the train to Amsterdam instead of flying. Counting the time it takes to get to Heathrow, wait in The World’s Longest Queues, clear security, eat stale sandwiches in the BA Lounge, sit on the tarmac, fly, clear customs, play luggage roulette, train from the airport and taxi to the hotel, travelling by rail is normally only about 45 minutes longer and unimaginably more comfortable.

This time, not so much.

20 minutes out of Waterloo on the outbound leg the Eurostar ground to a halt because of signal failures. This put us just enough behind scheduled that I missed my connection in Brussels and had to take the all-stopping-all-the-time Inter City train to Amsterdam.

The return journey, as outlined above, was a comic adventure of cancellations and misinformation. Still, worse things happen at sea and all in all, if I have to be stuck somewhere, it might as well be the Sheraton Brussels Towers, one of my favourite hotels. Thank GOD for business travel services: one call and they got me a room with a view.

Ten years ago when I still had hair and massive credit card debt, missing a train in Europe meant sleeping in a hostel or more likely a railway platform. No connections, no cash and no clue add up to adventures that I’m more than happy are behind me.

Sometimes, like now, I take a step back and look at my life and am honestly puzzled: Is this what it means to be a grown up? Do other people have lives like this (relentless travel, fucking hard work, relentless travel)? Apart from the boys on my team, I don’t know anyone who lives like this. OK, that’s not exactly true, I have several friends who live on the road. But they are mostly burned out hippies who peddle home-made herbal remedies at psychic fairs or trade hash-brownies for gas.

I work with a guy, I’ll call him Rich because that’s his name, who did my kind of gig for six years. He worked for BP (British Petroleum) and installed computer systems on tanker ships in Asia. He had, it must be said, a blast. He built up about a million air-miles going between London and Singapore, travelled all over Asia, slept with beautiful women and generally had the kind of life most 25 year old males would sacrifice private pieces of their anatomy for.

At 33 he called it quits, flew back to London, married his childhood sweetheart, had a couple of kids and seems to be living happily ever after. I’ve been doing this for two years and am honestly terrified of the thought of going back to riding a desk let alone staying in a city for more than four days in a row. What happens to guys like me? What woman would want us? We’re not exactly the safest bet for a long term stable relationship.

When I was six and I made the decision I wanted to be a photojournalist, more specifically, a war correspondent, I figured I would live on airplanes, be a cynical loaner and eventually retreat to a cabin in Big Sur where I could edit my retrospective show for MOMA.

I’m now 41, live on airplanes, am not quite as cynical or as much of a loaner as I used to be; that cabin in Big Sur costs $2.4 million and a MOMA show of my greatest hits would leave a good deal of white space on the gallery walls.

I take a bit of solace in the fact that I haven’t strayed completely from my childhood ambitions but I am constantly haunted by a feeling that the further I go into the mainstream of the business world the more the six year-old in me becomes horribly disappointed. I rationalize that this is just a phase and because I still take the occasional photograph and write throw-away pulp entries for a blog no one reads that I can still call myself an artist.

Bullshit. I sold out the moment I hung up my cameras and started working behind a keyboard for cash. No amount of rationalizing will change that and for all my agonizing the truth is that I didn’t just skid uncontrollably into my current life, I made an eyes-wide-open decision to abandon my old one; now I have to deal with it.

Walking down a sunny street in Oslo this morning I tried to simply be content with where I was and what I was doing. I wanted to expunge my normal feeling that I should be someplace else whenever I’m not in California. I utterly and totally failed to do this. I in fact failed so badly that I had to sit for a few moments on a park bench and try to regroup. I found myself asking the big question: “will I ever be satisfied anywhere or with anyone?”

Probably not.

I wonder if there is a support group for people like me? Something tailored for folks whose entire life is one giant Attention Deficit Disorder.

“Hi, my name is Mark and since I was 17 I have never lived in any one place for longer than a year. I refuse to buy anything that will not fit in a single suitcase. I don’t want to make any attachment that I am not prepared to break within five minutes and I always carry my passport.”

I’m not sure what “normal” is, but I’m pretty damn sure that how I am is not it.