Weekly news - Ukraine protests / Davos

The unrest in Ukraine escalated to a frenzied new height this week as it so inevitably promised to do, with many protesters being taken injured and 2 being shot dead. The seemingly intractable problem centres around the issue of the country being woven into the EU fabric as opposed to being smothered by the heavy blanket of Russia, who many believe to be calling the shots.

As with all such civilian uprisings they swiftly transcend the initial spark and ignite into something altogether more symbolic; of the masses kicking against an authoritarian state power that, instead of adopting measures to engage or reach compromise, choose to resort to control and suppression.

Personally, I find the struggle in Kiev to be a source of real inspiraton, futile though it may ultimately prove to be; and in Vitali Klitschko the protesters have a traditional revolutionary hero as their figurehead.

All of which makes me long for the possibility of similar protest breaking out in this country if only the initiative might be taken. Whilst the Ukrainians have Klitschko to lead them on, the best we can do is Russell Brand spouting his revolutionary hyperbole before scuttling back to his Hollywood Hills pad. God knows there is enough disaffection and animosity to fuel people on to make a defiant political stand as opposed to simply looting TVs from electronics stores and setting fire to newsagents.

Clearly, Boris Johnson believes such a threat must be brewing given that he has appealed for taxpayer funds to be used to purchase a riot control water cannon. Let's hope the summer is a hot one...

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You might be reading this and thinking - well, what would you have people taking such a stand against? How about the nauseating statistic provided by an Oxfam report this week that the entire accumulated wealth of the poorest half of the planet (some 3.5 billion) is equal to that of the richest 85 individuals.

Such a staggering figure must surely shine with forensic scrutiny on the crushing inequalities that intense financialisation has managed so spectacularly to inculcate and maintain. It is a figure emblematic of the absolutist supersession of capital over people.

You need not look far for evidence of this - from the rising numbers of homeless on London's streets, to the growing dependency on food banks, to Jamie Dimon the chairman of JP Morgan gulping down a $20million bonus despite the firm being fined roughly $20bn for violations over the past year alone.

But above and beyond such examples, the World Economic Forum in Davos is perhaps the most redolent of all that is wrong and perverse with the world. That these reptilian plutocrats are brought together to frolic in the filthy mudbath of their own lucre, often with the power of life or death of vast multitudes in their hands, all behind closed doors, free from scrutiny or effective accountability, is an affront to the risible notion of a democratic society.

As one the Founding Fathers of the US Constitution James Madison envisaged - the primary role of government was 'to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.' Davos is the epitome of that nefarious ideal.

Weekly news - Francois Hollande / Death of a Japanese soldier

This week the news media ejaculated with excitement over the story of French President Francois Hollande and his love affair with actress Julie Gayet. It is occasions such as these when the really shallow nature of the media is illuminated, for truly all the hallmarks of a salacious story are writ large - the power, the scandal and the glamour all intertwined like frenzied limbs in a secret hotel boudoir.

At face value, the story is another in a long and torrid line of statesmen infidelities, from Mitterrand to Berlusconi to Clinton; all have had their credibility and integrity severely shaken by the post-orgasmic shame of public exposure. The fact is, power and influence are (for some reason) very attractive traits and really the shock should arise when a red-blooded embodiment of power somehow manages not to embark on secretive dalliances.

Hollande's reaction was humorously ambivalent, refusing to discuss or to barely even acknowledge the scandal, his gameplan evidently being to ignore and hope it eventually withers away into nothing. Somehow I think, what with his partner still recovering in hospital, and the rumour mill churning as to a pregnancy, that hope may be futile, albeit being happy to give it a go all the same.

It's curious how attitudes to such events easily reflect national stereotypes. France, who are generally seen to be more laidback and open regarding sexual issues, have traditionally turned a blind eye to their head of state's misdemeanours, perhaps seeing a strong reaction as being far too infra dig. In Italy, Berlusconi's orgiastic tenure and wanton profligacy was handled in an almost braggadocio style, expertly complementing his well-crafted media image.

Whereas, in uppity Britain, you get the sense that even for Cameron, Clegg or Miliband to admit they possessed genitalia would require painful strategising as to whether such an admission adequately toed the party line.

And yet, for all the hilarity invoked by the sight of a power figure burnt by his own flaming passion, the whole issue is another distraction device for the masses, the levers pulled by the media to operate the easy headline generator that plays well to an audience fatigued by perpetual bad news that they can do nothing to influence, and/or has negative implications for them in some way. Never mind his hitherto woeful performance as President, sometimes we just want to laugh at someone who's been caught out.

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I was struck this week by the death at 91 of Hiroo Onoda, whose fascinating story I had not previously encountered. Onoda was an army intelligence officer who, refusing to believe that the Second World War had ended in 1945, spent the next 30 years in the Philippines jungle continuing his solo fight, only agreeing to surrender when in 1974 his former commanding officer rescinded his orders, thereby convincing him of the war's end.

This mind-bogglingly bizarre story stands as a testament to the fanatical loyalty of the Japanese military at the time, and illustrates a Robinson Crusoe-esque character marooned on an island of his own delusions, completely conditioned to a state of survival in wartime, and a firmly held belief that the reality of the world was not at all what it seemed.

If one were so inclined (and I am), it could be seen as an ingrained mentality not too far removed from that of the British, who still cling steadfastly to the patriotic fervour of the war victories that manifests itself now predominately in sporting events, endlessly regurgitated column inches and other cultural 'Keep Calm and Carry On' fluff, but still resonates through our unstinting and unquestioning celebration of the armed forces regardless of the mostly misguided conflicts chosen for their engagement since 1945.

Weekly news - The 'lawful killing' of Mark Duggan

Perhaps the most surreal aspect of viewing the news coming from the UK whilst spending 4 months in America in the second half of 2011, was my perplexed observance of the London riots that ricocheted out around the rest of the country.

In hour-long stints in the Santa Monica Public Library, surrounded by elderly people bemoaning their internet confusion and the odd weirdo brazenly watching porn, I tried to keep up-to-date on the unfolding chaos that appeared to have erupted in my home country but found it a struggle to fully anchor the images and footage in reality.

The incendive spark that was the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham was the leading story of the week again as the jury returned a verdict of 'lawful killing', and there were renewed calls for an overhaul of police policy amidst cries of corruption.

My thoughts on this issue are two-fold. The central bone of contention is whether Duggan had the gun in his hand as he was fatally shot, whether he had thrown it just before, or even whether he had a gun on his person at all. Whilst its tragic that a young father was shot dead, I do believe that some personal culpability must rest with him.

People do not own guns in cities or elsewhere for any reason other than to cause harm to someone else. Anyone walking the streets armed with a gun, regardless of whether they intend on using it, must have the implicit understanding that they risk being shot at by police trying to disarm them. Since no one in a civilised society should be carrying a gun, those who choose to do so make that choice knowing that they could potentially be shot themselves.

The major caveat to this is in the possibility that the police could have planted the gun in order to frame Duggan or to cover their own backs. In highlighting these troubling questions, the whole incident is another in a long assembly line of events that are said to erode away levels of trust communities hold in the police. The police appears to be, like the NHS, in an almost perpetual state of crisis, with one shambolic affair after another, from recent Hillsborough revelations, the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the whole 'Plebgate' debacle.

Which leads me to pose the question - why is there this equally perpetual cry that people can't trust the police? Call me cynical, but I believe trust to be a precious and often scarce currency that I most certainly wouldn't hold to any great degree in large institutions.

Trust in large institutions is damaged everywhere you look, whether its the Catholic church's abuse scandals, the banking sector (even a so-called 'ethical' bank can't be trusted not to hire a crack fiend as their CEO), government expenses, elderly care homes, Comic Relief investing funds in arms manufacturers, Amazon and Starbucks dodging tax, and so on. The list is depressingly long, and yet this is the reality of the way the world operates.

Large institutions, at the end of the day, are nothing more than groups of people, subject to all the foibles, tyrannies and lapses in moral judgement that every individual person is subject to.

Of course, in an ideal world, the police would be completely transparent and trustworthy, free from corruption, and tragic cases such as Mark Duggan's would not come charged with such an institutional resentment and doubt. But this isn't an ideal world, and therefore, the question 'will this damage trust in the police?' is misguided and naive.

The police is a large and faceless institution; why would you blindly place your trust in it?

Masterworks of Cinema #1 - 'Come and See' (1985)

Prior to watching ‘Come and See’ I recalled a quote I'd seen somewhere which said that in its portrayal of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War it ‘makes ‘Schindler’s List’ look like a Disney film’.

With this in mind I approached my viewing with an acute sense of anxious anticipation and a fair amount of scepticism as to the claim. It just so happens that Elim Klimov’s film may be the most grueling I’ve ever experienced, whilst also being certainly one of, if not the finest, war film ever made.

The narrative centres on the atrocities committed in the Byelorussian region, draped over the loose coming-of-age journey of the young protagonist Flyora. The central theme running through the film, acting as its spinal column, is that of evil. Not the evil of psychopaths or tyrants but the evil of ordinary men.

As the film begins, this sense of ‘ordinary evil’ – or, to coin Hannah Arendt’s oft-used term, ‘the banality of evil’ – begins to leak out gradually with the arrival of two soldiers, one stern the other jovial, to take Flyora away from his hysterical mother and younger sisters. The dread, tension and general air of foreboding proliferates right from the off.

These men turn out to be members of the Russian militia fighting the resistance against the invading Nazis, and yet it is this initial juxtaposing ambiguity that provides the canvas for what follows. There is the further dismay and rejection Flyora feels upon being told to stay behind at the camp whilst the others go off to fight, as well as being forced to surrender his sturdy boots for an elder's ragged and worn pair. This is the juvenile sense of 'evil injustice' that most children rage against at some point, that of being rejected through insufficient maturity or of having proud possessions wrenched away from them.

As it is, the Nazis themselves don't materialise until almost 90 minutes through the film; being symbolised instead by a recurring motif of a bomber flying overhead - the spectre of death always close at hand.

This point-of-fact is aligned to the film's ideological standpoint. It is removed from taking either a political or a moral position on the events being played out; it has a very Russian sense of passive detachment that amplifies the film's almost unbearable impact in a way that an American, and perhaps even British, film would never have been able to achieve to the same devastating extent.

In saying this, I refute the allegations leveled against the film of being overtly propagandist, despite it being sanctioned and funded by the Soviet Union, in that to my way of thinking it takes no sides, there is no moral redemption, there are no heroes on display. Instead you are simply exposed to the mind-bending horror that, like a surrealist nightmare, reveals itself to the viewer in incremental stages.

It is this suggested, rather than presented, horror that imbues the film with its nightmarish quiddity, and by so doing has often been compared stylistically to Kubrick's 'The Shining'.

There is little-to-no on-screen violence, it is all enacted off-screen, with the aftermath of the barbarity given full-frontal exposure. For instance, the charred body of a man burned alive, the bloody, beaten and gang-raped girl staggering towards the camera; these are provided to the viewer as testament to the most appalling acts of evil that are crafted and handled so brilliantly by Klimov that the cumulative effect is nothing less than the sheer dehumanising of everyone involved - of the victims, of the perpetrators and of we the audience.

In this sense, it is reminiscent of Michael Hanake's subversive yet lamentable 'Funny Games', a film in which despicable acts are played out in order to provoke the audience - as voyeurs on the wider terrain of violence - into a reaction, to challenge them to keep on watching. Whilst admittedly a worthy attempt at pushing the boundaries of morality and art, I found 'Funny Games' to be predominantly on the wrong side of flippant and, in comparison to 'Come and See', overwhelmingly glib and smug in its tone.

It is this thematic trope of forcing the viewer to endure and wallow in the evil of events that takes on a surrealistic corporeality when Flyora and Glasha (a girl with whom he forms a short-lived bond) wade through a feculent bog, caked up to the neck in the viscous mud, as they struggle at a maddeningly slow pace through a wonderfully-held tracking shot.

The centrepiece of the film is naturally the most harrowing. Rounded up by the marauding Nazis, a crowd of villagers are herded into a barn which is then set alight. We see nothing of the victims aside from a few muffled screams, instead the camera pans across the ranks of Nazis standing to observe the spectacle before breaking into applause as though they were watching an opera.

It is a scene of tremendous emotional weight, primarily due to the detached and unaffected tone in which it is captured. The Nazi soldiers are not inhuman monsters, they are not cartoon villians (as they are portrayed in Quentin Tarantino's rather lightweight 'Inglorious Basterds' for instance), they are simply ordinary men driven to commit acts of pure baseness by virtue of their human nature, contaminated by twisted ideology and the intoxicating power of crowd psychology.

Neither does Klimov make any attempt to portray them as complex characters, in the same way as Spielberg did with Ralph Fiennes' character in 'Schindler's List', they are as plain and as abstract as the people they brutalise.

It is this overriding idea that races to the fore in the final sequence (strikingly reminscient to the revelatory bursting into colour at the end of Tarkovsky's 'Andrei Rublev'), for my money one of the most breath-taking pieces of cinematic art ever achieved.

Spotting a discarded portrait of Adolf Hitler, Flyora finally has an ebullition of vengeful rage, repeatedly firing his rifle whilst archive footage rewinds events; his bitter shots representing an attempt at rolling back history, through all the rallies and demonstrations, speeches and parades, until we arrive at a family portrait of the Fuhrer as a cerubic and innocent child. It is this moment that explodes all the hollow notions of evil that have been displayed and that we been challenged to 'come and see'.

We, like the protagonist, realise the sheer futility in creating monsters or icons of evil out of men like Hitler because to do so is far too reductionist and simple. Events such as those documented in the film are too complex to be rationalised or filtered into a blind hatred for one man. Such a mentality is useless and prohibits any real hope of ever understanding, or attempting to understand, the inexplicable evil that ordinary men enact upon other ordinary men.

Weekly news - Drug reform / European immigration

The New Year was rolled out (pun intended) to the story that Colorado has become the first state to legalise cannabis for recreational use, joining Uruguay in helping to inflame a rejuvenated debate on drugs and their prolonged illegality.

On the surface this appears to be a victory for the liberal contigency of America - which on this issue has been far more progressive than the puritan UK government who still cling to the widely discredited 'war on drugs' mindset whilst sidelining the now-lauded spokesman for drug policy reform, David Nutt.

And yet, this is still in Colorado, a state not a federal law, and as such these first purchasers are in effect 'legal criminals', with the billion-dollar industry of 'Big Cannabis' beholden to the federal government deciding not at some later date to enforce the prohibition. Few expect this to happen but at present it is still a potential risk.

As for my view, I am convinced that legalising, taxing and properly regulating all forms of drugs is the most sensible and mature policy. Continuing to demonise, obfuscate on useful informational sources, and criminalise drug users - sending them to prisons which are often more awash with drugs than the streets outside - just seems illogical.

There are two simple reasons that are manifest as to why criminalisation fails to work.

Firstly, the human propensity to experiment and abuse drugs. People have and will always seek mind and mood altering drugs, whether exhilarating or anxiolytic, from the Chinese opium dens to the Georgian-era gin houses, to the explosion of a 'Prozac nation' over the last 2 decades.

Secondly, it is axiomatic from reading any personal account of addiction that the substance in question that has been stamped with the mark of illegality scarcely even registers on the consciousness of the habitual user. The deterence objective of the illegal status has been utterly supplanted by the physical and psychological need for the chemical stimulus.

With this in mind, surely it would be preferable for a properly regulated and mandated drugs market which eliminates the societal scourge of dealers, traffickers and inevitable gangs, as well as the constant influx of 'legal highs' with all their inherent ambiguity and misinformation regarding particular toxicities; not to mention funneling a new and much needed revenue stream into the Treasury.

All this said however, I do remain wary of blanket legislation. It is of course the case that some are more susceptible to addiction than others, as well as there being the obvious allure that may overcome those of a more curious disposition who would otherwise not have been tempted by experimenting with harder drugs simply through their lack of exposure or ready access. Only a comprehensive and fully considered system with proper help programmes for addicts and good quality information for prospective users will suffice. The war on drugs has been lost, its the quality of the armistice that really counts.

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The other major story to follow in the hungover New Year slipstream was the opening of the UK's borders to migrants from Bulgaria and Romania, a story that oh-so-predictably incites all the worst forms of latent xenophobia in people that UKIP hope to sweep up in their dragnet at the next general election.

The level of immaturity at which news such as this is presented across the media, with headlines shouting about 'vast waves' and 'uncontrolled numbers', means that, as with drug policy, a sensible and mature debate about immigration is derailed. Clearly, Labour's laissez faire approach to immigration from Poland and elsewhere was sheer folly, a consequence of the insouciant 'boom years' that now seem so far away.

But immigration on such a scale is surely a fundamental consequence of the neoliberal globalised world in which we are purported to now be inhabiting? Herein lies the paradox in the government's thinking. Cameron and Osbourne travel to China, Japan and elsewhere declaring Britain to be 'open for business' and espouse the merits of internationalism as positive tenets for the economy back home, and yet they then pander to the mediatised scaremongering which declares the possibilities of yet more migrants flocking into the country to work.

As far as I can see, it makes little to no sense focusing on the individual migrants themselves. So long as their working prospects in terms of being able to provide for their family are better here than in their home country, they will come. Instead, the government needs to tackle the employment sector, the agencies that advertise jobs exclusively on foreign websites, and the ruthlessly minded employers who exploit this ready and willing overseas workforce by driving down pay, job security and standards of living simply because they can get away with doing so.

Culture - December

Books read:

Hunter S. Thompson - 'The Rum Diary'
Will Self - 'Great Apes'
Franz Kafka - 'The Trial' (re-read)
Nicholas Tomalin & Ron Hall - 'The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst' (non-fiction)

The remarkable story of Donald Crowhurst, the ambitious amateur sailor - lends itself so absolutely to narrative retelling that its hard to believe in its actual truth. Despite having no prior experience of competitive sailing, Crowhurst entered the 1968 Sunday Times Round-the-World Race, setting off in a ramshackle trimaran and ending up as a hapless composer of a grand deception, convincing everyone that he was on cause to win whilst in actual fact never leaving the Atlantic Ocean.

The gravity of his duplicity steadily took over Crowhurst's sanity, leading him to record what he believed to be his uncovering of a 'divine philosophic truth' before finally taking his own life. Crowhurst is the quintessential Herzogian protagonist - a Fitzcarraldo or an Aguirre - psychologically flawed yet imbued with vast ambitious delusions that eventually consumed him.

Fiction-wise this month I was fatigued by the effort of wading through the turgid gloop that was 'Great Apes'. Will Self is perhaps my favourite living author (of which there sadly aren't that many), yet I found this book to be a quite tedious work. The premise, of a man who wakes up one morning after an alcohol/drug binge to discover the world has undergone a biological inversion - apes are now the dominant species - was initially intriguing. The thematic tropes explored - the consistent mating, the pant-hooting dialogue, the hierarchical structures - were promising as a work of satire, and would have worked perfectly well had Self being able to rein the whole thing in to a more succinct novella-length of around 100 pages. As it is, he instead strings out the puns, the cheap gags and the repetitive imagery to near-500 pages, with little in the way of a discernible narrative arc, dragging the whole thing out until its tired and withered conclusion.


Films Watched:

'Boogie Nights' (Paul Thomas Anderson)
'Rita, Sue and Bob too' (Alan Clarke)
'The Special Relationship' (Richard Loncraine)
'A Man Escaped' (Robert Bresson)
'Black Christmas' (Bob Clark)
'Prometheus' (Ridley Scott)
'Lawrence of Arabia' (David Lean)
'Spartacus' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Casablanca' (Michael Curtiz)
'All Quiet on the Western Front' (Lewis Milestone)
'Soylent Green' (Richard Fleischer)

As it was the lazy festive season I enjoyed some old classics this month, from 'Spartacus' to 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to 'Casablanca'. Conversely, I found 'Black Christmas' to be a surprisingly worthwhile watch; a reminder of just how interesting horror cinema was back in the early-1970s, as the slasher subgenre took its primary footsteps, laying the groundwork for 1978's 'Halloween' and the 1980s splurge of imitations.


Albums played:

Toy - 'Join the Dots'
The Album Leaf - 'A Chorus of Storytellers'
Boards of Canada - 'Music has the right to Children'
The Fall - 'The Remainderer' (EP)
Happy Mondays - 'Bummed'
Deftones - 'Adrenaline'


Gigs Attended:

Happy Mondays at O2 Academy, Bristol

As evidence of just how introspective and terminally nostalgic modern culture has become, the experience of going to see the Happy Mondays - a group so closely identified with the now-hyperbolic acid house/Manchester rave movement of the late 80s/early 90s - should be enough to prohibit anyone's dignity from emerging unscathed, band or audience.

And yet, taken on its own terms the gig is perfectly enjoyable. Shaun Ryder looks healthier than he has in years (not saying much mind), being as he is in the midst of his mainstream renaissance what with chasing UFOs around for TV; the band play well, locking together all those infectious grooves and guitar melodies that enabled them to bridge the gap between acid house dance and rock so memorably.

The band dynamic is rather amusing to observe. Brothers Paul and Shaun Ryder barely glance at each other throughout the set, and Rowetta frequently looks embarrassed to be there, but Bez, the shamanic master of ceremonies, still manages to distract and hold attention despite now being in his 50s. You can't help but think that in any healthy, self-respecting culture this kind of shameless retrospective flatulence just wouldn't be happening, but one cannot begrudge them this mid-life opportunity to recoup some earnings from the music they made together, nor deny it being quite good fun at the same time.


Exhibitions:

Dino & Jake Chapman - 'Come and See' (at Serpentine Sackler Gallery)
'Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain' (at British Library)

Tearing the city at the seams no.17 - Christmas in Cornwall

And so to Cornwall for Christmas, travelling southwest from London under a country-sized tarpaulin of rain.

This then is the antithesis of life in the big city; a place where at night you can stand and stare up at the stars as though it were the roof of some vast geodesic dome, and where you can walk through the countryside for a solid hour without encountering any other humans at all.

As befits the gorging season, the Christmas to New Year interregnum is like a corridor of interminable hebetude and woeful inactivity. There is the alluring dichotomy at work in which epic films are watched - this year 'Lawrence of Arabia', 'Spartacus', 'Ben-Hur' - in a state of almost terminal lethargy, shifting only to fetch another drink or replenish the supply of salted nuts and other calorific comestibles.

I like the way in which the on-screen heroics of Charlton Heston racing a chariot round a coliseum or Kirk Douglas rallying a slave revolt against Rome provide a Herculean counterweight to my own near-supine state, with only the repetitive levering action of lower arm to open mouth and back down again.

Increasingly, I've viewed this week of wallowing as sound evidence for the notion that humans can, and probably should, never be truly free. Despite all noble intentions, true freedom from work, stress and strife likely resembles nothing more productive than this perennial period of watching old films for hours on end whilst forcing down another alpine-peak of Toblerone.

But no, I thought. With the rains abating and the cold sun on display, it was time to stride out and explore the Cornish environs. From my parents' new house on the hillside of Higher Bartinney (the perfect place for harsh elements to take hold, cabin fever to set in, and familicide to necessarily follow), the nearest observation point of Carn Brea provides a pleasantly disorientating panorama.

The green fields lie spread out like an accumulation of snooker tables, as wigs of long grass are combed over by the sea wind. At this point, on the very toe of the British Isles, the sea is visible from dual sides giving the impression of being newly islanded on Cornwall. Or, at least, of having hitched up the rest of the country like a dress around the leg of this peak perspective.

From there I worked my way around the winding lanes towards the Cot Valley. Through the glutinous prism the hand-crimped hills either side assumed the appearance of enormous Cornish pasties, as the foamy beer poured in and out of the cove mouth.

I trudged on up the side of the pasty and along the bridle path towards headland Cape Cornwall, the top of which is marked, rather bizarrely, by a stone Heinz sauce bottle. This is not my attempt to eck out the food imagery still further; the Heinz company did actually gift this dubious effigy back in 1987, and can perhaps be seen as a precursor to the far-reaching claims on the built environment that brand marketing has since made, from the Phones4U Arena to the countrywide O2 Academies to the Sports Direct Stadium amongst innumerable others.

I couldn't resist imagining other recognisible brands standing proudly in stone upon the cliff-top - a Pringles tube perhaps? Or Coca Cola's curved glass bottle? Or a pair of giant stone arches? The possibilities are limitless, and surely no more bland than the crop of 'logo buildings' currently being inflated throughout London.

As I sat and surveyed the view I could feel my sense of scale being eroded into new forms. Being faced with such a pronounced geomorphology of the coastline, I imagined that the entire landmass of the British Isles had been greatly reduced, and that from my vantage point I was in fact situated in the Scottish Highlands staring out at the western ridgeline all the way down to the outward sweep of Cornwall itself.

On the horizon was Land's End, an outpost settlement that has long since succumbed to the usual bland commercial imperatives where travellers will find a multimedia 'King Arthur Experience' and a man charging £9.50 for photographs of you and your family beside the famous white signpost.

Heading back in land I arrived at the diminutive town of St. Just, an old tin mining community that, like the rest of Cornwall, now seems largely bereft of much real purpose save for maintaining and catering for the burgeoning tourist trade. Picturesque coastal locations such as Sennen and, naturally, St. Ives, appear to be made up almost entirely of holiday cottages with any pre-existing parochialism now an endangered commodity.

Meanwhile, the nearest major town Penzance, gives off the impression of being just another down-at-heel 'clone town' feeling the tight hug of the recession straitjacket. In the public toilets a prominent needle depository unit is in place, something scarcely seen in London; a stark indicator as to the inevitable negative social implications of the economic downturn.

By contrast, one evening we drove over to Mousehole, a quaint village set into the skirting board of the coastline. We scurried and nosed our way through streets lined by the famous community-funded Christmas illuminations, celebrating in 2013 their 50th anniversary. They put Oxford Street's efforts (which this year seemed to be a marketing exercise for an animated kids film) to easy shame.

Wandering through the centre of St. Just I stood by the WWI memorial, with names etched in stone and a simple commemorative wreath. 47 men from this modestly-sized town in all; several of the traditional Cornish surnames replicated twice or even three times, evidence of brothers signed up and marched off to give their lives in the terrible conflict that throughout 2014 looks set to be manipulated into a patriotic jamboree by shameless government ministers.

From this pondering on the horrors of war, it was time to head homewards to partake in the traditional family game of Risk - a bitter struggle for world domination and imperialist triumph waged with the fate of entire nations held in the sway of the dice.

The games played at Christmas do offer another curious paradox from the season of glad tidings and general merriment. Through a series of false accusations and libelous misjudgments we attempt to track down the perpetrator of a foul murder in Cluedo. And we attempt to grab, horde and gradually redevelop property portfolios in increasingly affluent neighbourhoods of London, creating wealth ghettos where through-transit is financially perilous, in Monopoly.

So here's to 2014, when we all pass 'Go' and begin another year-long circuit of the board.