Moranthology (19 page)

 

There's something to be said for the more misty aspects of human behavior. People operating on less coherent, yet still surging, instincts. People just . . . gathering.

The Occupy London movement set up camp outside St. Paul's Cathedral in September 2011, and stayed until they were finally moved on in March 2012. Many commentators derided their well-meaning incoherence. I loved it.

I
L
OVE A
P
ROTESTOR.
Y
OU
D
ON'T
N
EED
A
NSWERS—
J
UST
Q
UESTIONS.

I
love a protestor. We all protest, of course—getting out of bed with “My back!”, shouting at the television: “You ASS!”, reading the headlines with furious exclamations of “We did WHAT?”

But that's just a sentence or two—a minute of remonstration, and then back to wiping down the counter, stacking papers and talking about the profound oddness of the people next door. We protest for the benefit of our own blood pressure, then forget again.

But a protestor—a proper protestor; someone out there, protesting—I find to be a beautiful thing. An objection made flesh, a whole body made over to do one thing—voice disapproval, simply by standing somewhere.

In a world where a minute's remote dabbing at your computer can transfer thousands of pounds, order a car to your door or petition against a death sentence, there's something so simple, elegant and forceful about putting your shoes on, walking out of the front door, and going somewhere where you body is a vote, instead.

There's a group of Chinese Falun Gong protestors who've taken it in turns to man a small table, covered in leaflets, outside the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place, since 2003. Every time I walk past them I think of how there are no elections in China at all: this is the only vote they have; standing in the rain, trying to protect the bright yellow tablecloth with a spoke-spined umbrella, for eight years. Just standing.

If I'd had two gins and felt a bit whirly, I'd claim occupation-protesting lay on the borderline between politics and art—that by placing yourself, say, outside a cathedral, you mean, and become, something wholly different to when you are placed in a supermarket, buying vegetables. You put yourself somewhere you shouldn't be. You are the odd thing out. A misplaced item in the bagging area. And this is how you want to change the world: just by being a misplaced particle. Difficult to tidy away.

And, so, to the protestors outside St. Paul's Cathedral, objecting to the global banking crisis. Their presence has caused so much commentary—and from so many different viewpoints—that it is clear they have stopped being merely a news item—a fact to be told—and have crossed over into being an infinitely malleable metaphor for whatever the commentator wishes to project on them, instead. Toby Young in
The Telegraph
saw them as “preening narcissists,” only protesting because they “want to be on the news—that's all they care about.” Richard Littlejohn, meanwhile, saw them as “a gormless rent-a-mob . . . layabouts from Mickey Mouse universities.” I could spend hours suggesting why it might be that those particular people chose those particular epithets. Actually, I couldn't—it would take less than a minute and consist of shouting “POT! POT! POT!” over and over again, until my Kettle Black Timer went off.

Anyway. Nearly all those who protested against the protestors commented on two things: how unwashed and scruffy they are, and how the protestors have merely “vague slogans,” and have failed to say what their solution to the banking crisis would be.

To the first comment, one can only reply, “But dudes—they are in tents. It would be alarming and disconcerting if people sleeping on roll-mats in Central London emerged from their bivvies at breakfast, box-fresh, and sporting a crease down each leg of their slacks. Your insistence that the revolution be ‘smart-casual' suggests a lack of any pictorial reference points to previous revolutions. They tend to be fairly ‘festival chic.' ”

With the second caveat, I would be a little more disappointed that it had ever been voiced in the first place. Is this now the entry qualification for voter-protest—that we must have all the answers, before we are allowed to speak? That when it comes to a global banking crisis so severe and complex that the combined powers of the European Union cannot come up with a solution—other than going “Text China! They're LOADED!”—voters can't comment on it unless we've got a massive folder full of equations with “SOLVED! The Banking Crisis” written on the front?

If we insist protestors must shut up unless they have answers, we are confusing them with columnists, academics, advisors, politicians. And, at root, protestors exist for a wholly different reason to these people. It misses the point of why people put on their shoes, leave their houses, and stand in the wrong place for a long, long time. Protestors don't have the answers. They would never pretend that they are. What they are is a question mark. St. Paul's currently stands over a square full of question marks—each tent a black punctuation mark in the middle of the City. A huge black question mark we now see every night on the news, and in the papers.

And the question being asked, over and over again, “What are you going to do about this?”

They don't need to be anything more than that. Asking questions is beautiful. Asking questions is enough.

 

I found it one of the more incongruous coincidences that the slow dismissal of the underclass came at the same time as ITV1's massive them-and-us, upstairs/downstairs, master-and-servant blockbuster,
Downton Abbey
. I have a complex relationship with
Downton
. Well, not really. I think it's stupid—like a big dog in a dress, galloping around—and I delight in boggling at its every, demented, over-blown, eye-rolling move it makes.

I'd been writing about how enjoyably dumb
Downton
is for a year before I started to be quite good friends with Dan Stevens, who plays the show's Matthew Crawley—or “Handsome Cousin Matthew,” as I always like to refer to him in print, because I know it makes him a bit awkward, even though he cannot deny he is handsome. Incredibly handsome. Honestly, sometimes it's like sitting in a bar with the sun.

Dan—and I know he won't mind me saying this, mainly because he's too busy to read this, and so will never know—is a skilled party maximizer. A dedicated and joyous boozer with some manner of supernatural, endlessly forgiving liver. I once saw him accidentally fire a champagne cork at a tramp in Soho—but he subsquently apologized so profusely and literally handsomely that, in the end, I think the tramp felt flattered to have been assaulted by someone so facially perfect. That was the night that ended with him and Michelle Dockery—who plays Lady Mary in
Downton
, also a bit of a dude—crunking to Blackstreet's “No Diggity” in a nightclub at 2
am.
As I watched them, my mind made them wear corsets and World War One military garb. Given the amazing plotlines of
Downton
, it may well be something that actually happens in a subsequent season.

My favorite night out with Dan was when we attended an Olympic Ball together in West London, and vowed not to tie one on, as it was a school night. Everything went well until—on our way out of the venue, pretty sober—we passed a bar.

“We need cider. For the taxi,” Dan said, decisively. And bought four bottles.

Obviously, by the time we'd chucked that down in the back of the cab, we were wasted before we were even halfway home, and ended up going back to my house, and drinking half pints of port while listening to records.

At 1
am
I failed to find the record I was looking for—a bootleg of Elton John singing Nick Drake demos. Amazing—and went upstairs to wake my husband, who knows the location of all the records in our house.

“Pete,” I said, cross-eyed on port. “Downton wants Elton Drake. Semergency.”

He's still in my mobile as “Downton.”

D
OWNTON
A
BBEY
R
EVIEW
1: L
ADY
M
ARY'S
H
AUNTED
V
AGINA

D
ownton Abbey
returned—finally, finally—on Sunday night. I'm sure you're aware of this. You would have to have been on a spiritual retreat down a deep well, with your eyes closed, to have missed it—in the matter of promotion, ITV1 has been acting like a gangster-made-good, parading its beautiful-yet-spoiled daughter around a Mob restaurant, boasting about how beautiful she is.

“Have you seen her? Look at her! Look at her! She's
gorgeous,”
all the channel's full-page ads in the national press screamed. “Look at my little
Downton.
She's real classy. Nominated for Emmys and everything. She's my princess. Nuffink's too good for her.
Nuffink.
If you touch her you're dead, sunshine.
”

But then, who can really blame ITV1's pride?
Downton
is currently in the
Guinness Book of Records
as “the most critically-acclaimed television show of all time”—a fairly astonishing accolade when you bear in mind a)
Twin Peaks,
say, or
Life on Earth;
and b)
Downton's
much more urgent deserving of another record: that of Guinness's “silliest television show of all time.”

Honestly,
Downton
is off its chanks. Sometimes it plays as if writer Julian Fellowes sits at his writing bureau—overlooking his extensive lands, including
three rivers—
sucking on a helium balloon, and giggling as he starts bashing at his typewriter. This is, after all, the drama where an evil, chain-smoking maid caused her mistress to miscarry by deliberately leaving lilac-scented soap on the floor, which she slipped on. Yeah, that's right. She killed the unborn Earl of Downton with soap. This is a plot twist not even
Dynasty,
at its most gibbering, considered.

So here we are in Episode One, Season Two. It is 1914. All we can see is a nightmare-ish vision of mud and barbed wire. Shells whistle and explode as men fall to the ground, broken. In the trenches, men no more than boys weep, lighting cigarettes with bloodied, muddied hands. There's no two ways about it: this dinner party is going really badly.

Through the labyrinthine tunnels the cameras roam, until they find the man they seek: Matthew Crawley, played by Dan Stevens. In many ways, Crawley is the center of
Downton's
world: as the middle-class solicitor now unexpectedly due to inherit Downton itself—plus one-half of the Lady Mary/Matthew Crawley on/off love story—Crawley's character touches on every issue of class, destiny and desire.

More importantly than this, however, Crawley is unbelievably handsome. It is notable that, in this Stygian quagmire, he alone is immaculate. While everyone else looks like a bog troll, he is blonde, burnished and pristine. Perhaps the mud—being French—is asthetically highly-tuned enough to respect his beauty, and refuses to cling to his astonishingly well-cut trenchcoat and buttermilk skin, out of sheer love.

Either way up, Julian Fellowes knows the assembled nine million viewers haven't rocked up to ITV1 for
Wilfred Owen: The Movie.
There are nine million Cup-A-Soups going undrunk as the audience shouts, “This is a bit of a downer. Where's Maggie Smith looking snooty about someone using the wrong boot-buttoner?”

To this end, two minutes in, Matthew Crawley stares out into the middle distance of WAR.

“When I think of my life at Downton, it seems like a different world,” he says, impossibly yearning, as the scene fades to black.

And so we're back to lovely old reassuring Downton itself, where all the things
we
yearn for occur: flighty maids making up beds with billowing linen; frisky footmen standing to attention as ladies alight from carriages; posh girls setting down their tortoiseshell-backed hair brushes and weeping over thwarted love affairs. Life is carrying on at Downton, despite the war—or “This DAMNED war,” to give it its full name.

And its full name is being used often. People are referring to the war a lot. Despite the First World War being, surely, one of the Top Ten Events It's Unneccessary To Back-Ref, it seems any slight change to the domestic routine since Season One must be contextualized with a quick mention of the ongoing world-wide conflagration.

While this is amusing during a scene of overdue cushion-plumping in the drawing room—“There's a war on. You cannot keep standards as high.”—it reached its apogee when Lady Sibyl bumped into Lady Cora in the hallway.

“This is early for you to be up, Mamma.”

“War makes early risers of us all.”

This begs the viewer to ask, “Really? Is the sound of shelling in the Dardenelles carrying all the way to Yorkshire?”

As well as being a hinderance to cushion plumpness, war, we discover, is also a massive bummer. Lady Sibyl receives a letter telling her a former beau, Tom, has caught it in Flanders.

“Sometimes, it feels as if all the men I've ever danced with are dead,” she sighs. Darling, I've been to office Christmas parties too. I know exactly how you feel.

And it seems love is being thwarted left, right and center. Sexy DILF butler Bates looks like he's finally going to get it on with housemaid Anna, after spending all of Season One mooning after her like a calf on Wobbly Eggs. He even gets around to telling her his plans for their future life:

“I want to open a little hotel, in the countryside,” he says, holding her hand outside the scullery.

The Bates Hotel? Really? That's honestly his plan? You can imagine Julian Fellowes taking a particularly huge hit off his helium tank as he wrote that line. As fans of the show will know, Fellowes seems to reserve all his most wiggy helium moments for Bates. Bates, let us not forget, was the one who wore a “secret leg-stretching contraption” in Season One—until he wearied of the pain, and hurled it into a lake.

Anyway, Bates's Season One Secret Leg Contraption Agony is as nothing compared to the torments Fellowes has for him in Season Two: seconds after announcing his Bates Love Hotel plan, Bates's evil, estranged wife turns up to banjax everything.

Understandably, one-legged, love-calf Bates is initially unwilling to receive her—keeping her waiting in the kitchen for half an hour.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Vera,” he says, finally arriving. “I've been . . . up in the lofts. Sorting out . . . some cupboards.”

One look at Vera Bates's Super Evil face tells you that, with excuses like this, Bates is gonna be dog-food. She will screw him over, right into Season Three. All housemaid Anna can do is run off, and cry into her apron near a butter churn.

Upstairs, and love is equally complex. Home on leave, the luminously handsome Matthew Crawley attends a fundraising concert at Downton, allowing him to bump into Lady Mary for the first time since she dumped him, then he dumped her back (it's complicated. Just go with it).

Despite Matthew now being engaged to the sappy Lady Lavinia, and Lady Mary being pursued by Richard Carlisle (“You mean Sir Richard Carlisle? Who runs all those ghastly newspapers?” Lord Crawley expositions, handily. Often,
Downton
might well be renamed
Exposition Abbey
),
we know Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley will end up together, eventually. Their love is real and true—for Matthew still loves her, despite her Terrible Secret: a brief fling with a Turkish diplomat, which ended with him dying in her bed.

Although I'm not certain of all the technicalities, I think this means Mary's private parts might now be haunted by the ghost of Mr. Kemal Pumak. I keep waiting for it to jealously go “WoooOOoooo” every time she looks at Matthew Crawley.

Alas—as Episode One finished, I was still waiting. There's no dice as yet—but with another seven episodes to go, and
Downton
reliably demented, I'm pretty confident that I'll hear Pumak's muffled “WooOOOooo” by the end.