Buddy Holly and the Crickets in 1958

As part of my series of articles on band names, I thought it would be interesting to go back to the beginning of the band name itself.  The folk music of American immigrants from Europe, known as Hillbilly, threw up a few interesting group names in the 1930s – notably the Skillet Lickers.  Primarily, however, Hillbilly, or Country as it was known from the 1940s, was a style based around individual singers.

More influentially, into the 1950s  black R&B musicians in the United States started adopting quirky collective nouns – The Orioles, The Penguins, The Crows.  

In Texas, Buddy Holly, dutiful son of a religiously conservative family, secretly listened to black musicians on late night radio. Amongst them was New Orleans vocal group, The Spiders. Later, when he became a musician himself, Buddy had to think of a name for his own group. Using The Spiders’ name as his starting point, he searched through reference books on entomology,  eventually finding his way towards a much less threatening insect, the cricket. Crickets are harmless little creatures, which under the cover of darkness, fill the night with their chirpy sound. The story of Buddy Holly is something similar, the story of a young man using a kind of camouflage to make forbidden music.

This camouflage was vital.  In white dominated 1950s America, the music of black R&B musicians was a symbol of moral threat and a focus for bigotry.  Philip Norman in his biography of Buddy Holly quotes from a leaflet distributed at the time, to restaurants and shops throughout the southern United States:

“NOTICE! STOP! Help save the Youth of America.  Don’t buy Negro records.  If you don’t want to serve Negros in your place of business, then don’t have Negro records on your jukebox or Negro records on the radio.  The screaming, idiotic words and savage music of these records are undermining the morals of our white youth in America.  Call the advertisers on radio stations that play this type of music and complain to them…”

If the Crickets wanted to write and play music inspired by black musicians, they could only do so by hiding in the linguistic long grass.

Beatles related graffiti – photographed during my visit to Abbey Road in 2005

Buddy Holly died in an air crash in 1959, but the musical force he helped set free continued to develop world-wide. By the early 1960s two young Liverpudlians, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, were trying to think of a name for their band.  As Buddy Holly fans, they naturally followed tracks that Crickets made through dangerous social undergrowth.  They decided to keep with the insect theme and become The Beatles.  While the name Beetles had been on Buddy Holly’s own list of insect related name options, he realised that mainstream taste was not ready. It would take a few more years before Beatles would be acceptable, which even with its musically adapted spelling, suggested darker connotations of scuttle and scurry not seen with crickets.  A style of music once symbolising sin and social breakdown was now becoming an accepted part of global society.  Some bands even felt it was safe to call themselves The Spiders, major examples including a successful Japanese group formed in 1961, as well as a 1964 version of Alice Cooper’s band.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars – one of the first albums I ever bought

The Spiders as a band name probably had its greatest success in 1972, when David Bowie and The Spiders From Mars shot into the rock stratosphere. Now it seemed the world could fully accept a group of musicians named after the kind of creatures that Buddy Holly had to turn into crickets.

The Smiths in 1985

Continuing my irregular series of articles on band names illustrating artfully selected words, we now come to The Smiths.  I knew there was a lot going on with this name, so I read Johnny Rogan’s massive Smith’s biography The Severed Alliance. And after reading all those hundreds of pages, I came to the conclusion that the two words The Smiths used to identify themselves might qualify as their definitive achievement.  This comment is not as flippant as it might seem. During his 1970s schooldays at a tough Manchester secondary modern, future lyricist and lead singer, Steven Morrissey retreated to his bedroom, taking refuge in the music of Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Marc Bolan, and the New York Dolls. With vague creative ambitions of his own, young Morrissey would enjoy making up clever book titles and chapter headings for novels that never happened. Morrissey seemed better at the flash of insight rather than the long slog of consolidation.

Once he left school our unlikely hero joined forces with guitarist Johnny Marr, and against all odds became a singer songwriter himself. At this point, Morrissey came up with his best title ever – The Smiths. The name implies so many things. First, there is that sense of a back to basics approach, as a reaction to glam rock, or pompous concept album rock. Yet this is not back to basics in the sense of a Punk band thrashing around on instruments they learnt to play last week. Instead, there is a suggestion of artisanship. A smith labours in a sweltering smithy, making horseshoes and ironwork. This is a person who upholds traditional values of application and honest service.

At the same time, there are darker undertones to explore. Originally, the band considered the name Smiths Family. The word family implies togetherness. Think of The Partridge Family – sunny and happy on a bus with David Cassidy, his mom and cute siblings. The Smiths, or The Partridges, divested of the word family, conjures more of a vision of one of those clans who fight amongst themselves, using any energy left over to terrorise their local area. The Smiths had much of the anti social behaviour order about them. Their shows were famously rowdy, with Morrissey welcoming a good stage invasion.  He could also be relied upon to provide controversial quotes, supporting the violence of the IRA, or the extreme fringe of the animal rights movement.

The name is also strangely reflective of the times the band lived through. The 1980s was a divided decade. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would often refer to her personal values resulting from a Methodist upbringing in a greengrocer’s shop in Grantham – solid virtues of hard work, thrift, and respect for the rule of law. Yet she was also profoundly confrontational, having no time for consensus, compromise or the status quo.

Margaret Thatcher’s hope was that the 1980s would turn Britain into a kind of vastly successful greengrocer’s shop, or smithy.  But there were so many contradictions – the talk of thrift, honesty, hard work, set against the flashy lifestyle and murky ethics of the money-driven society the Thatcher government helped encourage.  There was also that conflict between harking back to supposed traditional values of application, self reliance and the rule of law, whilst also rejecting equally traditional values of respect for compromise and consensus. Amidst the resulting confusion it is perhaps not surprising that the 1980s were violent years defined by miners’ strikes and city centre riots. This was a decade yearning for lost values, even in wanting to tear them apart. By some miracle, all of these conflicting forces were held together, for a few years at least, in The Smiths.

A “selfie” of me and my brother taken in a mirror at the Tate Modern, London

A few weeks ago I wrote about the name of the band Blondie, amusing myself by reflecting on the ie ending, which is typically used in words that convey a playful, childlike quality.

While writing that article I started thinking about the word selfie.  This manner of presenting yourself has become hugely popular. On Instagram over 90 million photos are currently posted with the hashtag #me.  According to Wikipedia, the first written use of the word occurred on an Australian internet forum on 13th September 2002, when Nathan Hope wrote:

Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer (sic) and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.

Of course Nathan did not invent the word selfie.  This was just the first time the word appeared in print, just like George Harrison did not invent the word “grotty”, even though, the first print use of that word came about in the transcript of an interview with him.

From Nathan’s description of his mishap in 2002, selfies proliferated.  Their huge impact has attracted some substantial analysis.  Elizabeth Day writing in The Guardian has compared the selfie to pictorial representations of the self going all the way back to hand stencils seen in prehistoric cave art.

Stenciled hands at Cueva de las Monas in Argentina.  The art in the cave dates from between 13,000 to 9000 years ago 

But here’s the thing – imagine you are at a concert.  You are on stage and everyone is waving their hands above their heads as you sing your latest hit.  Those hands do not signify individuals so much as a mass of people offering up their hands, their abilities, their efforts, to the greater good, which in this case is the person on stage singing a song.   Hands held up in offering to the singer suggest the suppression of individuality.  I remember reading Hard Times in the Sixth Form at school, a book in which Charles Dickens called industrial workers “hands”, because to the factory owners that’s all they were.  And archeological evidence would suggest that individuality wasn’t important back when prehistoric people blew pigment around the outline of their hands.  Prehistoric people seem to have lived as Kalahari bush people do today, sharing all they have with each other.  Individuality came later as a more complex society required people to play lots of different roles.

And so, to cut a long story short, we get to 2002. A young Australian man gets drunk at a party, falls over, sustaining injuries which probably require the attention of an oral/maxillofacial surgeon, and then takes a photo of himself in said state of disarray.  The selfie was born.  If ever there was an art form that expresses the swing towards the importance of the self, then this is it.  Some commentators describe selfies in terms of narcissism.  There is some support for this view in that ie sound which ends the word, harking back to childhood where the self and its needs are all there is.  The hands of the caves are no more.  The complexity of society has produced individuals, and the ultimate in an individual art form.

And yet we remain social animals. The selfie is a fun, playful image of yourself – but it is also a planned image masquerading as the playful.  Trained selfie takers use a high angle, which serves to make the eyes look bigger and more appealing, as well as tending to have a slimming effect on the face.   Then you might apply a filter, something with a nostalgic tint perhaps that suggests happy hours spent surfing waves that broke on beaches in the 1970s, a beach trip from which you have just returned all tousled and refreshed.   Then this honed image goes out to others, who might provide likes. The hope is that your face will meet with approval from the wider group to whom, if you’re braver, younger and better looking than me, you offer yourself up.  The selfie is you, but it’s you going out to others.

It’s the summer and people are taking their holidays.  A few days ago, my brother set out on his bike ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats, while my wife found us a hotel in the Forest of Dean, convenient for meeting up with the intrepid adventurer.  It seems natural to take trips like this.  It’s hard to remember that until the sixteenth century, most people had only two options for getting away.  You could become a soldier, or a pilgrim.  If you didn’t fancy the prospect of getting hacked to death, or facing a dangerous journey in pursuit of dubious spiritual gain, the only other option was to read, or more likely listen, to a story.   Not surprisingly, authors aiming to transport their readers often based their work on activities that offered escape in real life. English literature’s oldest work, Beowulf, written some time between the eighth and eleventh centuries, tells of a warrior journeying in pursuit of a monster. Then in the fourteenth century, Chaucer wrote his famous Canterbury Tales about a pilgrimage between London and Canterbury. Going back to the military travel option, the fourteenth century also offered readers Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by an unknown author, following the wanderings of a soldier trying and failing to live up to the virtues of knighthood.

At about the same time, William Langland was attempting something a little different. His traveller was a ploughman, who rather than leaving his monotonous rut in a physical sense, went journeying in dreams.  Piers Ploughman is like someone sitting in their bedroom, reading.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of travelling to a new world while not straying too far from home was catching on. Places in the UK that happened to have an otherworldly feel became popular tourist destinations. Mother Shipton’s Cave, Britain’s oldest paying visitor attraction, opened in 1630. The Mother Shipton experience involves a gentle walk beside the River Nidd, to an unusual cave formation produced by the passage of mineral-rich water.  Here, conveniently close to the Yorkshire town of Knaresborough, visitors find themselves in a place that seems a world away. Other easily accessible escapes also became popular.  The Silent Pool and Box Hill in Surrey, Chedder Gorge in Somerset, Lydford Gorge in Devon, Dovedale in Derbyshire, the whole of the Lake District, and Puzzlewood in the Forest of Dean, all provided a way out into the unknown.

Once again the physical places where people went to escape, influenced the writing that served a similar purpose.  Mother Shipton’s Book of Prophecies was a best seller in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Lake District influenced a lot of famous poetry. Martin Tupper wrote stories about the Silent Pool. Keats wrote about Box Hill. Tolkien visited Cheddar Gorge, which influenced his imaginary Helms Deep.

Tolkien also visited the Forest of Dean – as I did this weekend – and probably made his way to the well-known curiosity that is Puzzlewood.  This is an amazing few acres of woodland, growing around a collapsed cave system and Iron Age mine workings. I paid my £6.50, walked down a path beside an enclosure for hens and passed through an opening between thickly foliaged boughs.  Then, against all odds, the forests of Middle Earth reared up around me.  I saw a child in a Star Wars T-shirt, busy exploring the forest planet of Takodama, a part played by Puzzlewood in Star Wars The Force Awakens.

Walking through Puzzlewood I was walking in a story, a place that takes you somewhere else, while staying in the world you know. 
 

Last week I wrote about two carefully chosen words – Weather Report.  This time I want to write about a single, carefully chosen word.

Blondie is the name of an American rock band fronted by Deborah Harry.  According to Rolling Stone magazine, Blondie has sold in excess of forty million records over the course of a career starting in 1974.

For a single word, Blondie has a lot to say.  First, there is the biographical background it reveals.  After graduating with an arts degree in 1965, Deborah Ann Harry worked at BBC offices in New York, then as a waitress, a go-go dancer and as a Playboy Bunny.  I don’t know if young Deborah found herself called Blondie at the BBC, but in her waitressing and dancing jobs, this was how men often refered to her.

The first thing to note about the name Blondie is the “ie” ending.  This sound often denotes something small, insignificant, playful, charming, as in cutie or sweetie.  The linguist Otto Jespersen has suggested that the effect of ie is to convey a childlike quality. Children tend to add an ie sound – one of the easiest to produce – at the end of words as they begin to learn language.  As a child struggles to master the tricky business of talking, there seems to be a natural tendency to return to the security of something easily managed.  In this way, the ie sound is associated with children.

So Blondie has this suggestion of something cute and childlike.  Those characteristics then collide with the reality of Blondie as a hard-hitting rock band. Blondie now takes on a different nature.  There is something tough in the name, a denial of intimacy and individuality. It’s a generic nickname for fair-haired young women, which while starting all cutesy in the nursery, has now taken us into seedy bars and clubs where superficial adult relationships are playing out.

The music Blondie made is like a novel based on the short story of their name. Listening to my favourite Blondie album Parallel Lines, we meet Sunday Girl,  “as cold as ice cream but still as sweet.”   Heart of Glass, portrays a similar character. A glass heart suggests someone tough and unemotional, but also fragile and vulnerable .  In One Way or Another, a cold hearted girl is both a stalker making dark threats, and a playful little thing, giving you the slip in a game of hide and seek. There’s Pretty Baby – that ie sound again – about a young girl trying to separate the fantasies of romance from reality.  Picture This, apparently a love song, is actually a celebration of the vision of a loved one rather than an acceptance of their reality. Fade Away and Radiate , similarly, paints a picture of someone watching a film, who feels a deeper connection with a silvery screen goddess than with real people who mock her in daily life.  Finally, there’s a line in I Know But I Don’t Know, about how “I’m your dog but not your pet.” Blondie is a pet, a bunny, a cutie, the vision of a perfect, undemanding companion; but you’d be wrong to think that this pet isn’t an animal with teeth.

So there you are – Blondie, an album of songs in itself.

Weather Report were a jazz fusion band of the 1970s and 1980s.  As well as recording wonderful music, they came up with a band name illustrating the effort that has to go into finding just the right words.

In 1970, pianist Joe Zawunil, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and bassist Miroslav Vitous, all luminaries of the jazz scene, decided to form a new band. They did not, however, have a name to describe themselves and their music. Zawunil, in an interview with Jazz Forum magazine, recounted how the three of them met at his New York apartment and went through countless names. They kept coming back to Daily News. Knowing this wasn’t quite right, the struggle continued, until Wayne Shorter pondering on the fact that news programmes always contained a weather bulletin, suggested Weather Report.

Weather Report is a better band name than Daily News because it is difficult to see a jazz band as a group of journalists. A clear story does not arise from free flowing music without lyrics. If a piece of jazz music were a news story, you wouldn’t be able to work out what was going on in the world that day. Daily News is too literal.

Weather Report tells a different story. The weather is vast and ever changing, benign, glorious, dull, violent. Our ability to understand and predict the weather is partial. It’s like listening to music. We’re aware of pattern and meaning there, which remains enigmatic, beyond our ability to fully comprehend.

Weather bulletins always come after the news, a tacit admission perhaps that talking about weather is shorthand for talking about nothing important. Nevertheless, we might round all this up by remembering that, despite their position at the bottom of the news pile, weather reports can pass on information that will blow your house away. Music is harmless entertainment, and a force with enough power to move millions. It’s a breeze on a sunny afternoon and a landscape-changing storm.

None of this is in the Daily News; it’s all in the Weather Report.

This book is about a Paris bookseller, who styles himself a literary pharmacist dispensing books for emotional ailments. I work in an actual pharmacy, so I was interested in this idea. Real pharmacy, of course, is precise, with cures measured in milligrams. Literary cures are not going to be like that, and the sceptical part of me wondered at the wisdom of comparing the vague benefit of books with pharmacy. Yet as a reader, I had the sense that books are good for you. So, what benefit might I gain from The Little Paris Bookshop?

Initially I didn’t seem to be gaining very much. The story started well, only for the plot to become decidedly shaky – based on a misunderstanding that was difficult to accept in people who were supposed to be sun-moon-and-stars in love. There were coincidental meetings that strained credulity. The sentimental view of books themselves became wearing, almost as if this was a novel about the idea of a good book rather than the thing itself. After all, Southern Lights, the book that literary pharmacist Jean Perdu most admires, is itself fictional. Only a pretend book can be perfect. We do have to accept that about books. This is where we come on to something more positive. Real books are not perfect, but they are the only kind of books that are going to offer us something we can use.

Back in the real world, The Little Paris Bookshop made some reasonable claims for the value of books. Books typically take you into the experience of someone who might be very different to yourself. In this way, they can help enhance a sense of empathy. That’s what I think Nina George is getting at when she says reading can make people more temperate, loving and kind. In this respect, the call for the world’s rulers to take a reader’s licence is a good one. However, Nina George is also right when she says that reading cannot give the power of empathy to a person who lacks it. “The truly evil… did not become better fathers, nicer husbands, more loving friends.” Sadly there is no cure for sociopathy.

So beyond the fact that books can make nice people nicer, what is there? The Little Paris Bookshop has no easy answers on that score. Books do not seem to be the solution to Jean Purdu’s problems. In fact, you could say he turns his back on books and goes off and gets a life. But what kind of life is that? Well, it’s a kind of glorified boating and beach holiday. He goes on a trip he doesn’t really need to take, but goes anyway. He is not looking for anything in particular, which provides the kind of open-ended journey where he does actually find something. Maybe that’s what a book is, a holiday, special in not being strictly needed.

I have to admit this wasn’t the best holiday I’ve ever taken. Some fellow tourists did get drunk and over excited.  However, there were some interesting views, a few worthwhile excursions, and some holiday reading that stayed with me after I returned home.

Memorial to RAF West Malling at King’s Hill in Kent 

Last weekend I took a ride to what was once West Malling Airfield. This former Battle of Britain air station is now a smart housing development, at the centre of which, next to a Waitrose shopping centre, stands the old control tower, repurposed as a coffee shop. After a cup of tea and slice of granola, I went to have a look at a memorial behind the control tower, a segmented circle arranged around an RAF roundel. Each segment either defined a wartime slang word, or carried a brief story from the airfield’s history. There was one story in particular that caught my eye. 85 Squadron based at West Malling became expert in night fighting, so much so that the government spread a rumour that their success was due to a diet of carrots boosting the pilots’ night vision. This fabrication served to disguise the existence of airbourne radar used by the squadron, while also encouraging people to grow vegetables.

I wondered if this carrot story had anything to teach us about why some falsehoods become accepted as fact. So, I consulted Psychology Today, found a list of reasons why powerful rumours occur and applied them to carrots.

Rumour feeds on anxiety, tending to flare up around particularly stressful events, like 9/11. Rumour and crisis go together because in times of stress, evolution has designed us to seek out and share information to help deal with an emergency. Unfortunately when information is lacking we tend to make things up, since exchanging information, even if it is false, tends to alleviate our anxieties. So, even though there was nothing people could do to see better in the black out, exchanging information about carrots helping night vision made people feel better.

No matter how ludicrous it might be, a rumour tends to start off in something that could actually be true. George W. Bush did not say “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”. But with a history of linguistic faux pas, it’s the sort of thing he might have said. Thinking of carrots, they are a source of vitamin A which is involved in eye health, even though eating carrots is never going to turn your eyes into night vision scopes.

Easily swayed nonexperts are more important than influential people in giving power to rumour. Psychology Today uses the example of Bubble Yum, a chewing gum product from the 1970s which aimed for immediate bubble blowing squishiness without the bother of preparatory chewing. Some imaginative child in a New York school wondered if Bubble Yum’s squishiness was due to the fact that it was made from spider eggs. Research commissioned by Life Savers, the company manufacturing Bubble Yum, estimated that within ten days of the company learning about the spider egg rumour, well over half of New York’s children had heard the story. This powerful rumour did not spread because of celebrity endorsement, or through major media channels, but by passing between children in playgrounds. Going back to the carrot story we see that the people who propagated it were housewives who prepared food and their children who ate it. John Stolarczyk of the World Carrot Museum – who knew there was such a thing? – suggests that the carrot rumour probably started among people like this. The Ministry  of Information then reinforced the message for its own ends.

The more you hear a rumour the more you will believe it. The idea of Carrot vision could be reinforced at most meal times, and on most dark nights.

A wartime poster celebrating the power of carrot night vision – courtesy of the World Carrot Museum

Rumours reflect the zeitgeist, that is, a potent rumour will concern itself with what people are thinking about anyway. They might be thinking about a political candidate in an election, which provides fertile soil for rumours about them. In the case of carrots, people were thinking about fighting a war, finding enough food to keep them healthy, and finding their way safely around towns and cities blacked out at night. The carrot rumour naturally combines all these things.

Rumours are simple and concrete. Rumours have a single, uncomplicated, vivid message.  We only use ten percent of our brains. People swallow eight spiders a year in their sleep. Carrots let you see in the dark. We remember concrete, sensory things better than abstract things. We remember “carrot” better than “truth”.

Rumours are generally connected to people we dislike or envy. Rumours often attach themselves to celebrities, people who are admired and envied in bewilderingly equal proportions. Cher and Janet Jackson have both been the victims of stories about ribs removed in pursuit of a better figure. The most powerful rumours go even further and imagine the death of a celebrity. Catherine the Great died trying to make love to a horse. Paul McCartney is dead. Avril Lavigne is dead. In the case of carrots, any sense of dislike is transferred to a German pilot over Kent getting shot down by John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham based at West Malling Airfield.

So the carrot story, by any measure, makes for a powerful rumour and has a lesson for us about today’s “fake news”. We live in uncertain times, with worrying problems in major governments, creating the basic state of anxiety in which rumour proliferates. We have massively enhanced powers of communication passing information quickly to millions of people who are not expert in what they are reading or watching. The internet tends to reproduce an idea in endless loops, typically packaged in short, uncomplicated, often visual presentations, which we now describe as a meme.

This all goes to show that no matter what conspiracy theorists may say, the mainstream media is not the creator of fake news, just as New York’s newspapers did not create the story about spider eggs conferring squishiness to Bubble Yum. Powerful organisations like the British Ministry of Information can support rumour, but the fuel which fans the flames comes from fear, envy and lack of specialised knowledge amongst the population itself. Indeed the current role of reputable news organisations these days is not creating stories. Instead they are often trying to debunk them,

Perhaps it’s a way of simplifying things.  Whether it’s historical periods,  ideas or inventions, we like to link them all with one person.  Monarchs are a shorthand for their time. Famous scientists are picked out of a tangle of piecemeal progress to stand for that progress. Isaac Newton for example, is famous for his scientific work, and also for his ruthless efforts to deny the efforts of others.

Then there’s the writer, the name that appears on a novel,  or a collection of poems.   Surely a book is not like seventeenth century science hi-jacked by Newton, or sixteenth century England, personified by Queen Elizabeth I. Surely a book is about individual creativity?

Well, no not really.  A book has an author, which simplifies a complicated reality which involves a lot of people. To start with there’s the long suffering wife, husband or partner who might have lent financial support, manuscript reading time and ideas. Then if you’re lucky there might be editors, agents and beta readers, all feeding into this project which carries the author’s name like a kind of branding. Of course there are gradations, with someone like Emily Dickinson at one end of the scale – famously working in reclusive isolation – and Zoella at the other, who apparently chatted to an editorial team at Penguin, who then wrote her novel about a young girl who makes it big in the video blogging world.

However, even with contrast as stark as this, we have to be careful about making assumptions. The mythology of Emily Dickinson plays up her isolation, when in fact, for a recluse, she was extremely sociable – it’s just that she tended to carry out her relationships with people via letter.  About a thousand of her letters survive, although this is probably only one tenth of the total.  One of her favourite correspondents was sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, who according to biographer Wendy Martin offered friendship, advice, and editorial suggestions.  Emily Dickinson did not work in isolation.  Writing is communication and you simply cannot do it alone.

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And that brings me sadly, to politics. Writers do not work alone, and neither do politicians.  While a writer bigging themselves up might be annoying, the idea of the great individual can be positively damaging when someone in politics starts seeing themselves as some kind of superhero. Governments are huge organisations involving thousands of people. It is damaging when one person begins to think they are more important than the institutions that provide the stability of government. In the UK, prime ministers ask you to elect them because they will give strong leadership, as though that is the key to success.  This is simply not true. In fact, you could say the opposite is true. A truly successful country has strong institutions that protect against the vagaries of individuals.

Switzerland, for example, is one of the world’s most successful countries. It also has a government designed to make sure that strong leadership concentrated on one person does not arise. The President of the Swiss Confederation is the presiding member of the seven member Swiss Federal Council. The person filling this role is elected for a one year term by the members of the Federal Assembly. The President chairs meetings of the Federal Council and undertakes representational duties, but does not have any powers beyond that of other members of the Federal Council. It is very unlikely that you know the identity of the current person holding the role of president – who when I wrote this article happened to be Doris Leutard – because the Swiss system does not seek to concentrate power in one person.

Doris Leutard – This photo is from the website of the Swiss Federal Chancellery

The Swiss government is the equivalent of  an editorial team with Doris Leutard as the writer. Doris might write an article after reading and thinking about pieces written by other people. A partner will read early drafts over, make a few comments. Doris may then change some things. The fact that it’s got her name on the finished product should not deceive you.

If you are one of those unsung heroes who have helped a writer, leant an ear, read their stuff, made suggestions, given time and patience and received no recognition, this piece is dedicated to you.

First a little history for you.   Folk tales took place in our world, even if their location was far away or long ago.  In contrast, fantasy authors since the nineteenth century have shunted their stories off into separate worlds, often helpfully mapped in the first few introductory pages.  This shutting away is a major characteristic of modern fantasy writing, illustrated by the fact that as of 2017, Wikipedia lists 202 fictional worlds created by well-known authors. It’s as though real life doesn’t have room for fantasy anymore.  Fantasy has been banished, like an eighteenth century convict sent to Australia.

A Game of Thrones appears to follow this familiar pattern.  The story is set in its own fictional realm, with maps provided of three fanciful continents, Westeros, Essos and Sothoryos.  However, the story opens with a more historical than fantastical feel. There are no wizards with pointy hats.  The powerful families of the book take advice from “maesters”, people who are like early scientists, studying the technical aspects of medicine, architecture, history, navigation and so on.  Old wives’ tales concerning lost magical forest dwellers do not impress them.  They have shut the old tales out of their minds.  In fact this shutting away of folklore is made literal, by a vast ice barrier.  This is a kind of Hadrian’s Wall, manned by a group of soldiers known as the Night’s Watch, blocking all access to the northern part of Westeros. It is not entirely clear what lies behind this fortification, beyond a sense of slowly developing threat. We hear stories of magical goings on, which the maesters airily dismiss.  An ocassional zombie-like creature emerges to do battle with the Night’s Watch.  It’s as though all the folklore of Westeros has been exiled behind that wall, just as fairy tales in the real world have been exiled to their own separate places. You get the feeling that the power of those tales is not happy to stay there.

Meanwhile in the medieval setting south of the wall, George R.R. Martin tells a well-handled tale of brutal, self-involved, incestuous politics.  There are complex meditations on the nature of power and virtue.  However, for me the real quality of the book is that underlying sense of old world legends and tall tales shut away, waiting to come back. If you were to write a book that was both modern fantasy and a thoughtful reflection on modern fantasy, then  A Game of Thrones would be it.