Category: Unregenerated

We are out of date, we know that. It is nearly here, the new world, and who are we to hold it back? We would prefer to get out of the way – to keep to ourselves so as not to detain it. Why does it demand that we stand in the open like everyone else? Why do we, too, have to be counted?

For a long time, we went unnoticed. They had other concerns, the bringers of the future! They had their eye on the new technologies and new investments. Theirs was the fervid South of the country, where everything was happening. The North was the rustbelt; the cities were like broken machines, they did not belong to the present. And who were we who lived in the rustbelt? Ignored, passed by, we knew they would not come for us.

What use could we be? We belonged to the past and the rotting of the past. We belonged to the tower block and the council flats and to those dark estates that were like the estates of Poland. How many of us there were, and all over Europe! How many of us, lost in the past and in the rotting of the past! When was it that time stopped going forward? When was time turned back upon itself?

This was our pride: the city had turned back on itself; it did not look outward. Darkness everywhere – we belonged to it, the city, as it rotted. How was it the city’s decay could welcome us? How was it that we were included in its self-demolition? Because it was by decay that our friendship passed. The city was the third term in our friendships. How was it that friendship was folded into the city itself? And how was it that they were lost, those friendships, when the city opened like a new fan?

We no longer recognised ourselves; where were we? Where were our friends? The old haunts disappeared, and when new ones came they were not for us. What of the warren of passages through the old estates? Gone too when the regeneration came. Gone, the towers and flyovers and the old club in its concrete bunker.

2

And didn’t it end as the money came from new Europe to our city? Wasn’t it then, when the great light came and we had to hide in darkness from the light? What it seemed to take it also gave – music was covered in the newspapers, in new magazines; it was everywhere, but then, too, it was nowhere, for hadn’t it retreated from the complex of which, once, it was part?

Then music, which was once the map of our city, withdrew into itself. Music, now, was only music – or if it was not, then it was so only for those in the know, and who were we, whose friendships were failing and for whom the city was turning into a new dawn? We fell apart into private bedrooms; friendship was privatised along with everything else.

This was the time of the narcissism of the Couple: since there was nothing outside, the domestic was all – people moved on, they found other things to do with their lives. Why not? Jobs had come; the regeneration provided for them. God knows, there was even arts funding – it had reached us, here. But it was already too late. We went in separate directions. We had to look after ourselves, we who no longer knew ourselves in the city.

3

It was happening elsewhere, but not for us. We were too late for one world, and too early for another. The internet would not come for several years, and meanwhile? We sold our records and boxed up our tapes; if we read, it was alone, and we kept our books for ourselves, that used to circulate between us. And didn’t we retreat into our private idioms? I couldn’t understand you – and you, could you understand me?

It was the New Realism: each of us was on the way to a career. How could it be otherwise? We’d missed our appointment with the present, and it was time to catch up. The future was coming, when it would all be different. And wasn’t there an interval in which we, even we, could enter its kingdom? But if we did, it would be alone – every man for himself and every woman. Every couple for themselves, that’s how it was, we who were now dispersed across the city in flats of our own.

No longer could you call on anyone. Phone first – better still, plan in advance, make an appointment: we’ll see each other on Sunday, on Sunday night. And you couldn’t meet anyone by chance, everything had to be deliberate – we were to carry calendars in our heads. Feb 15th – ok, we’ll see each other then. But when you no longer live side by side? When your room was no longer next to theirs?

Now friendships grew up around work. The world had shifted; if you didn’t have a career, what then? There was no one to be unemployed with; the old haunts had gone. No more sitting at the cafe in the sun; no more free gigs and in-through-the-back-door gigs. Everything was official; the future had arrived, pristine and gleaming. New supermarkets and cycle lanes everywhere – how could you resist? Nothing could go underground, because there was no underground.

Friendships took place in the light and by way of the light. That is, there were no friendships, only potential contacts, only those networks which are the negation of friendship and the negation of love. For hadn’t it reached love, the New Realism? Wasn’t love itself privatised – contracted upon couples in flats who saw only other couples in flats? Contracted upon them, become narcissistic – there was no love, or love had been bent back upon itself, half-destroyed. How was it that love wanted to destroy itself?

The North had become the South, which we had fled. Now the North was the South, when we’d escaped to the North to be away from the South. What we had escaped had come up to find us; we couldn’t postpone it any further: the South was no aberration; it was the future and the shape of the future. It was spreading from there, from the South, as it was spreading all across New Europe.

The destruction of love. The destruction of friendship, all the slack taken up – and we, who were the slack, were to be taken up. Time was not to lag behind itself. We were to be on the same time, to set our watches by the future. No more wounds and tracts of time; no longer days wandering in the open. Sadness: the retreat of time, the end of the open day.

We are of old Europe, and the new Europeans are coming. Yes, we know it – of old Europe, of the old and the relapse of the old and this is not our time. The future! How bright and dazzling it is! How splendid! But it is not for us. Splendid, we know that, dazzling – its marvellous – but it is not for us, we’ve been counted out, and it’s only right. What place would we have there, in the new Europe? How would we know what to do?

Better old Europe for us, we old Europeans. Better the rust belt for us, we who are used to the old world. Let us rust with the rusting machines! Leave us there to rot, with the machines that rot! Do not let regeneration touch us! Keep the new European money away from us! It would be wasted, if it came to us. What would spend it on, we who have dim eyes and clogged ears, we who stagger to the pub in the evening and stagger home from the pub at night? What have we to spend money on? Let it be spent on others! Let the others be regenerated, and not us!

For we do not want bright new bodies. We do not want to be reborn in the new dawn! Better our bent and coughing bodies! Better the old degradation, the old wheezing and complaints! But you are coming, aren’t you, technocrats of the new order? You’re coming with your investment and your plans? No stagnancy – no corner of the world untouched. Nothing unregenerated and no one who will not acquire the new skills. We are to be trained, we know that. Everyone is to be trained and retrained, we know that. Our skills will be transferable; we will go wherever we are told to go; a new life awaits us and our bodies will no longer be so sluggish and so dull.

Why do we smoke so much? Why do we drink so much? Why our obesity? – it is a living affront, our healthlessness, our obesity. Because we are not yet fitted to the new world. Because our bodies, which could be the bodies of anyone, are holding us back. Why should Europe lag behind itself? Why is it that Europe is snagged by our pale, obese bodies? We are an affront, a challenge. Not an embarrassment, but a challenge. For the lifestyle gurus are coming to find us. They’ll track us down and find us. The life-coaches will get us. We’ll be assessed and our needs identified. We’ll be assessed and motivated and sent on courses and trained and fitted to the new world.

And those who train us will weep with happiness. Those who reform us will tell their spouses and friends about us. I’m working with the long term unemployed, they’ll say. I’m doing some voluntary work with the long term unemployed, they’ll say, trying to get them back to work. What miserable lives they have, they’ll say, they look terrible, they dress terribly and they spend all their money on beer and cigarettes.

We are to be made new. Millions will be spent on us – making us new. Because the new world is coming! New Europe! And all of Europe must be prepared – every corner! No one must be untouched! Our names will be called! Our social security numbers will ring out! Each of us will be judged and assessed and then trained! Each of us will report for training! And our lives will be like our podgy bodies – a residue. And our lives, trailing sickly behind us, will be a flabby residuum.

Old Europe! We will forget we were ever alive then, in the old Europe! We’ll be trained out of it, the habits of old Europe and the welfare culture of old Europe! Because the new Europe is calling! It’s time to be trained, time for the body to be slimmed down and toned! New bodies for new Europe! New, trained bodies for new Europe! Trained minds – and trained bodies! For that’s what’s coming: a lifestyle politics. That’s what’s on its way – a politics of the lifestyle, where training passes through every part of your life, through every sinew. How sleek we will be in the future! How fit and how sleek, we men and women of the future!

We’ve seen something like it before, that’s true. We’ve been sent on courses here and there, that’s true, and we’ve met them, our trainers, the Christian-capitalists, the socially responsible executives of the new order. We’ve met them and known our own failure. How could we measure up! What good are we who can barely tie our own shoelaces! The world has moved beyond us, that much is clear.

How we will disappoint them, our bright, new trainers! How we will disappointed them, us clients! Because they know we’re not happy, they’re certain of that. They’re doing it for our own good, that much is clear. For our own good! For the good of everyone! For the good of the new Europe, where everyone is equal and equally empowered! For the new common sense of the new Europe! That’s what you really want, isn’t it – to lay off the booze and lay off the fags? That’s what you really want, they say, speaking our language – to lay off the drink and lay off the smokes? It’s what you really want, isn’t it, an interview suit? It’ll make you much happier – losing some weight. Interview skills, back to work – it’s what you really want, isn’t it?

How stupid we are, how dense, we who do not dream with them! How slow we are, how stubborn, we who will not change in the flames of the future! For our own good, we know it, and hang our heads. They’re working for us, for each of us, and we feel ashamed. Every one of us – targetted and assessed. New Europe comes looking for every single one of us! New Europe itself in the sleek bodies of our trainers! What fools we are! How retarded we are! For they’ve come, the assessors and trainers, right to our doors! Knocking on our doors, each of one of us! They have our names, and their working their way down the list. One by one, by name, by social security number – we are all to be accounted for.

We know we’ve been spolit, we know we’ve had it easy. £50 a week – too much. £50 benefits – too much. They want to see something from us. We are to be helped to help ourselves. Old Europe has made us soft. We are too fat for the future!

For a long time, we thought they hadn’t noticed us. For a long time, after we were laid off, we thought – this is it, we’ll never be reached, we’re too low on the list. But New Europe has its eyes everywhere. New Europe – the all knowing, all seeing eye has our number!

Who’ll bother with us, we thought, there are more pressing matters, after all. There are wars to occupy them, the Eurofighter to build. There are regulations to prepare – they won’t need us. We won’t be needed by the New Europe. We are defunct, like the scrapped machines in the rust belt. We are as East Germany to West Germany, as the cosmonaut to the astronaut. We are the space station Mir falling to pieces in the sky. Why should they bother with us? Why shouldn’t we escape their attention? Because New Europe knows we are a cancer that devours it from within. A cancer – devouring it, New Europe, from the inside.

For my body is also your body, New European. My sluggishness, the vagueness of my thoughts – yours. Yours my dim eyes and clogged ears. Yours my fat body and blackened lungs. Yours – New Europe, never yet itself, never having achieved itself, you will not close the circle. It is our bodies that detain us. It is by our bodies that we will fall behind. What are your plans to us? What are your programmes? Who reads the brochures that fall through our letterboxes? Who listens at the training sessions and back to work sessions?

We resist – through inertia. We will endure – because we can’t be bothered. Happy stubbornness of our limbs and entrails! Happy our shortness of breath! Happy that we die below the average age and drag your averages down! Happy that we smoke in doorways and on thresholds! Happy that we take no exercise, except to stagger to the pub and stagger home from the pub, all the while getting fatter, all the while dragging the averages down! Happy that we fail or drop out of every course you tailor for us! Happy the cancer that will creep through our bodies!

For that’s what we are: a cancer. That’s what we are – disobedient cell, that has not heard the signal. New Europe is calling – but we are not listening. New Europe is blazing above us – but we are not looking. 

The Last Days

Wisdom of the everyday. Wisdom of the long term unemployed, as each day dripped from the sky to form the stalagmites we were. Or were we like the coral forests, accreted from chip cartons and chewing gum? Or were we the nymphs in the pond, still trapped in our old bodies when the others had long since hatched? It was along the floor of the world we were crawling and with dull eyes looking up above the waters to where the others were flying with new, bejewelled bodies.

Around us, the great regeneration. Of what did we dream in those, the last days of the welfare state? In the coming day, shadow, I knew I wouldn’t see you. Never again that turning back when your body, mute, inert, becomes more present, and this presence becomes more heavy and more strange. Body without name and without form! Presence that cannot be called living or dead! Who was I – a dead man? How was it I already lived posthumously, I who was still quite young? The new day was coming and the shadows would be banished.

How many years in that room at the top of the house? I would not say I was happy there. In the summer, baking hot, and in the winter, freezing cold. My laptop on the table by the window. Always half-lit or unlit, the curtain pulled across the window. And pictures of neolithic horses on the wall as though I was in Lascaux, in the womb of the earth. It was a room like the others. What did I do there? What was I to do?

That was five years ago. Who am I now? Well fed, with friends around me, I am not as determined as I was. Then I knew my life as struggle and as the imperative to struggle. If I was tired, I lay down on the carpet; if I was awake, I worked. Who was I, then and at that time? One stretched across the day. Unemployed and thereby infinite, strewn across the day. What did I say to myself? Concentrate. No diversions. I had to gather myself together. But how was I to hold myself together, in that room, in that house?

Routine: the coffee shop and then the circuit round town. I passed the elderly, mothers with pushchairs, the unemployed, the alcoholics: yes, they were with me; our bodies knew one another. Did we say hello? The day was wearing out, we knew it. The day resembled itself, slipping out of use; we knew it in the tiredness of our bodies, correlates of the worn out world. And regeneration? Was it coming? Coming, yes, but not for us. We were to be left behind; these were the last days.

The Recorder

Sometimes I met him by chance, the one who lived in sheltered accommodation. We used to talk of Denton Welch – why him? – and John Cowper Powys – why him? Coffee? I would ask, and only once did he accept. But he was frightened in the closed space of the cafe with the windows misted up and full of people. We sat in the window, but he was frightened, and left quickly. Another time, in the fog, we walked out to the field. He was happy in the open space, he said, but closed spaces terrified him. ‘And I can’t be near people’. Very well. He didn’t have a phone, and I didn’t have his address. Did he know where I lived? We met by chance. Chance arranged our rendezvous in the day, but by chance, too, I knew each time might be the last. Very well.

Who was she, S. S., with her alliterative name? Why wasn’t she at work? Often she was, in her pin stripes and glasses – she would pass me in her small car, bent over the driving wheel, but sometimes I would meet her on the streets, her bare eyed and lost. She worked odd shifts. She spoke to me of her boyfriend. She loved him, she said, and couldn’t help it. He was no good, she knew that. Road crew to The Verve, going from one town to another. She still loved him, she said. She was abandoned to her love. She was the crystal that had formed around love. ‘I know he’s a bastard’. What happened?, said her face to me. Why hasn’t my life turned out as it should have? And wasn’t that the question behind everything she said: have I been cheated of life?

In the record shop, the owner and his assistant were always laconic. From them I took up the expression, ‘oh aye’. They were always still and calm when I brought in CDs and exchanged them for other CDs. What would stir them? What would impassion them? They were used to seeing me, but I didn’t spend money. I brought CDs in to exchange, and took CDs away; that was my role: I kept their stock moving. Did they approve of me? In truth, I wanted to be one of these laconic men, men who said very little, but who were always there, constant, as the world turned around them. I wanted to speak with restraint, and let my intentions be known without expression and emphasis. ‘Oh aye’: for now, I was but the changer of stock, the CD rotator.

In the video shop, I would meet the conspiracist who would speak of the new world order and the disaster that would befall us in the new millenium. He, like me, rented videos to pass the afternoon, returning them in the early evening for a discount. Up and down the racks we looked. Which one, which one? We had seen everything. Like me, he was a deep sea diver of the suburb, he walked along the bottom in a diving suit. Was he an unemployed actor? That’s what he told me. And what of his plans to make films about the new world order? He was afraid of the year 2001. ‘That’s when it’ll happen. They’re coming for us, man’.

Who would remember the minutiae of the day except me? That’s what I was: the recorder. So did the day know itself. So did it remember itself. New cafes were appearing; I tried them all. I passed mothers with their pushchairs and the alcoholics in the sun. And sometimes I would go to Safeway to witness the beauty of one of the assistants – who would remember her as she appeared in the day, if not me?

And how did I appear to the others? The one who spoke of what he would do, not what he was. The one displaced and out of time. Was I out of focus, too? Had I come to resemble myself? It’s true, I had plans; there was a direction in which I was moving. I was ready to be taken; I prepared my CV and my letters of application. Was that what I was waiting for – the rapture? Yes, the rapture was a job, the dreamt-of job, but I was afraid of being left behind. I was wearing out the carpet on the stairs – and would I, too, be worn away?

What did my face say to others? What was said by my gait, my gestures? I am waiting to begin? I am waiting for life to begin? So we encountered one another at the bottom of the world, beneath time. I signed on every fortnight, but fortnight collapsed on fortnight, and it was as though I were living the same life over and again. How to preserve momentum? How to steer when there were no stars to steer by?

The Encounter in the Desert

Perhaps there is an encounter when the world changes direction. Perhaps in that moment we can know the turning back of our bodies, their heaviness, another desire. We were left behind? – Well and good. We were going nowhere? – That was how it was. Who was I, when I reached out to you? And who were you, shadow? I dreamt I met you in my room above the world. A room? A shell, decorated like a cave, but opened by a skylight to the heavens (the cold poured through there in the winter – poured, yes, I could feel air rolling down the walls. And the sun shone through it in the summer, when it was always too hot, dust motes moving in the air).

The desert grew. Did I dream of a companion in the desert? Rather, the desert become companion, my own shadow, coming to me from a past that was not mine. Who are you, shadow, at the bottom of my memory? Days passed, night passed and I was in the room above the world with horse paintings on the wall. When was the last time I’d been touched? No time for that now. I was in the corridor with my eye on the light. Move quickly!, I told myself. I was finishing the first book (though that would be rewritten). Move quickly!

The regeneration was complete – was it true? Everything was over but the denouement – was it true? I dreamt of you shadow, horror of absence, boundlessness of the night, desert of the end, desert of the left behind. When will you come, and to whom will you appear? Why do I dream that the rapture draws back before itself as the delay that is the site of your address and from which your address can take place? Who are you advancing under the veil of the unemployment and as the shadow of a person?

It was our bodies that would speak, but only by interrupting us. It was flesh that would speak, unregenerated flesh, like the glass ground into the pavement and the drifting kebab wrappers. Was this the world in which our desire was caught? Worn out world; image of a world I remembered so as not to engulfed in forgetting. And if I imagined myself the day’s servant, what was this but a desire to be chosen? I was not chosen. What was a place of transit to the workers – a day off, the road that led to the bar – was our world. And didn’t that count for our bodies, too – what mattered was not what we could do, but what we could not. Lift your hand to the door, turn the handle. And when that fails – when you cannot lift your arm?

Wipe the glass – what can you see? No one; the face of no one. But dream of the kingdom on the other side of the mirror. Smash the glass – there is the world of the capable and the working. And meanwhile? In the meantime? They came to the house, the inspectors. They looked at my room and spoke to my landlord. We spoke together in the front room of the house. I would find work soon, I told them. Soon, I’d be away from here. Soon I’d break the mirror.

Stillness

A kind of tranquility is said to come to those afflicted with total paralysis; they who can only move their eyes are claimed to lack the input from their paralysed body that would disturb them. If they weep, this is not because of their mute isolation (they can only move their eyelids), but because of the sweetness of their solitude.

Is this true? Who was it who told me this, and how would they have known? Perhaps what I heard was the correlate of my own dream, once upon a time, to withdraw altogether from the realm of action. Then I imagined it, the world in which others moved and acted, like a bank of snow, pure and simple. Why would I want to make my mark on a world that was perfect as it was?

I imagined wishing it well, the world, from the perspective of total paralysis, as if only my stillness would allow the world to be pristine. And who were they, who acted? Ones who had a right to act, who were gifted with the capacity to act from the first. I was not to act, but to redouble what I saw as the non-action of the world – as its stillness beyond the movement and the actions of others.

Or was it that that movement was also part of non-action, and the swarming of others through the world was similar to the labours of the ants in their ant-hills in the woods? How quickly they moved, but how still were the trees. Action was only part of a great non-action; the world turned through light and darkness and everything was the same.

When was it that I changed, and wanted to act? When money came to the city; when I knew I’d have to force myself back into the world’s hubbub. Soon, I would have to rejoin it, the world. But how could I? I was already lost in a kind of fog; the world was hazy to me. In the mornings, I wandered along the street to the cafe; instead of returning, I would make a small circuit of the town. There were the alcoholics, drinking in the morning sun. It was the morning, and they were ready to greet the sun with a drink.

Where was I? Where had I found myself? This was Manchester, and I was doing nothing in particular. How old was I? Young enough, I think, to know the pressure to deliver, to make good on my potential, had not yet arrived. I had a couple of years left, that was my alibi, and in those years I would have to discover a voice to speak and hands with which to act.

I was having an affair. She said: I would like to put to you in one of those houses. I looked: a paved street of small houses, no cars allowed. House turned to house across a few yards of pavement, ivy on old brick, gardens with potted plants and basketed flowers – how pretty! I would have liked that life. She drove me to the countryside in the summer haze. What was I supposed to be doing? I’d forgotten.

The Gentrifiers

In those days, the house prices hadn’t risen; my town was still an obscure boondocks on the edges of the city. Who could come there? No one who did not had a deliberate purpose. So the days passed dreamily, as though I’d fallen outside history. The drug dealers in the house opposite were part of this world. When they left, and the curtains were open at last, I knew this was the beginning of the end.

Sometimes, car-radio thieves would come round the back of our house and knock on our kitchen door. ‘I brought these’ – and they’d open a sack of car stereos. ‘You’ve got the wrong house, mate’. In the early hours, burglars would use our garden as a run-through. This, too, was just.

Then one day, they came, the family from London. They began to do up the house opposite. The curtains were opened, the rooms painted, the floors sanded. From my upstairs window I could see everything. Waking one Sunday morning, I heard the woman of the house speaking to another woman, another Southerner. What was happening to our street?

I knew this was no place for me. I, who’d moved North to escape the gentrifiers had been discovered by them. No longer was this town a dreaming arm of greater Manchester. They had come; I was discovered. I didn’t belong here, I knew that. Were there any obscure places left? How far would I have to go? Or was it that I would have to act and make my way in the world?

I brooded in my room above the world. I could see across the rooftops, but what could I see? Prime real estate. What would happened when the tram line reached us? I shuddered. This was the end. Wasn’t this the part of the city where all the bands had formed? Wasn’t this where they came, the bands, living on the dole, passing years in rehersal studios and local pubs?

One morning, I blanked the woman from the house opposite when she greeted me. How rude! Everyone around me was talking, acting. It was time to do something. I knew the country was changing, that gentrification was spreading from the North to the South. (And when I moved further North? It followed me here; everything was happening. Where was a suburb in which to maroon myself? There were none.)

Action, non-action: what had happened to the old inefficiency? Where were the dossers and the skivers among whom I could hide myself? They liked me at the Job Centre because I was polite and others were impolite, but what would happen, now the world was changing and perfecting itself?

Refusal

Was it then I saw the protest by the quadriplegics? They allowed their paralysed bodies to be lifted from their wheelchairs. Dangling heavy and opaque, they symbolised non-action. This was their protest: anger at a world which defined ability as action. Refusal – but a refusal of the measure of ability. Their bodies inert and dangling. Marvellous reproach! For who remembers the density and heaviness of their bodies? Who remembers what they are unable to do and the darkness of a body that closes itself from light?

No doubt it is a lie, what is said about those who endure total paralysis. But what is known of the world on which action loses its grip and its measure? Back in Manchester, an old man called out to us as we passed. He had fallen on his doorstep, and we helped him up. Back he went inside, frail and vulnerable. He died a few weeks later, and the house was sold. Then they came, another family, sleek and ready. They arrived, the second family, to open the curtains and let sunlight into the house.

I watched them from my room. An era had finished; a new world was completing itself. It was irrevocable: bodies were no longer to be heavy and inert. Bodies were no longer allowed to be sick or unable. The fog was dispersed; sunlight reached everywhere. But the light was merciless. I knew it would spread across the world – what horror – and I dreamed of a protest of refusal and inability, of Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’.

Letters arrived; we were summoned for retraining. Each of us was called and separated from the morass. We had a name, an identity, and we were assigned a Case Worker. The light was reaching us. One by one, it would reach us, and shine into the darkness of our bodies. We were to awaken, we sleepers. A new day had come. And what were we to do, we who’d banked on structural unemployment? There were no corners in which to hide; down into the cellars snaked the probe-heads of the new order.

We were sought, found and rounded up. The world was moving, and we were to move with the world. Manchester had been the galaxy slowly turning in the dream of its industrial past, turning in the blight of drug addiction and petty crime – and now? The city had awoken; regeneration had come; the city centre was changing and change was spreading from the city’s heart.

Paperchase

One day, by chance, I found myself in Paperchase, a new shop in the city centre. What was this? Luxury pads, luxury pocketbooks, a whole shop, upstairs and downstairs, for luxury notepads. What was this? Upstairs, a coffee bar. Luxury pads and luxury wrapping paper. What was this? What kind of shop was this? What did people do here?

When I left, they were doing up the area around the river. The river – what river? I never knew there was a river in Manchester. But there was a river, and high walls kept us from the regeneration. What was happening inside? What was to happen? New Paperchases. New bars and new walkways, and perhaps a new tramway. The Corn Exchange, where you could buy herbal drugs and pocketknives, bongs and comic books had become the Triangle, a luxury boutique. What had happened?

European money, they said. But where was it, Europe? Where did the money come from? And was this to happen everywhere, in every corner of Europe? There’s a new world coming, but not for us. There’s new light shining, but not for us. But we will be remade, there’s time. As the sun reaches you through your closed eyelids, so will the new light know the inside of your body and Paperchase open in our hearts.

Then I sensed it: Manchester was only drawing in breath. Manchester was only beginning to draw deep on the lungs of Europe. What would happen when it exhaled?

Out of use – Unemployed, out of use, the rustzone of old Europe. Was it to a nation of Liverpools to which West Germany was reunified? A nation of rust and misery? There will be nothing left of it, the rustzone; already the investors are buying property. In Poland, in Slovakia, the regeneration is underway. Perhaps there is nothing that can be put beyond use. But what of the irradiated zone around Chernobyl (didn’t I read of a ‘danger tourism’, where Chernobyl – even Chernobyl – becomes spectacle)?

A  vision: Europe 2050. Rome has become an image of itself; Berlin is its own image; Madrid resembles itself. The history of Old Europe is finished; old Europe is over. Europe has stung itself to death. Europe has hollowed itself out with self-hatred. ‘What happens here?’ – ‘Nothing happens. It finished long ago’. – ‘What happens here?’ – ‘You’re too late. Old Europe dreams of itself. In its boulevards and arcades, Europe dreams of what it was’. – ‘What happens here?’ – ‘Nothing will happen; Europe dreams of itself, that’s all. Europe is asleep and dreams of itself, that’s all’. Through Museum Europe, the tourists come and go.

What happened to the last Neanderthals, driven to the edges of Europe by the new breed? What happened to them, cave-dwellers, driven to their caves west of the invaders? They knew they did not belong and could not belong; they knew the world was not theirs. They were not hunted to extinction, I know that, but died of shame. No one tormented them, the new breed were kindness itself, bursaries were offered and scholarships set up, but the Neanderthals knew they were not for them, and that to take them was to die of shame. For all that, they still died, ashamed by their heavy brows and brutishness. They died even as the world was offered to them. They died because of that same offer, because of the shame in their hearts as they knew they were unmatched to the world, that nothing was possible for them, that their old lives had fallen away and the new breed was coming.

But they also knew, as they died of shame, that their successors, too, would one day die of shame. They knew the new breed would become the old breed and there were others on the way. And it is true, with our apish nostrils we can smell the change in the air, we sense what they, the new breed, cannot sense. A change is on the way, and as we are excluded, so they shall be excluded. A change is coming, the new breed beyond their breed has set out to find them. Will it always be like this, succession and annihilation? Will they always be be coming, the breed beyond the new breed? Will we always be outdated, we who are driven to the West, to the edge of Europe? They will come as they always came, with new skill-sets and new enthusiasms; they will come with a new sense of project and possibility; they come – faster than before, always more keen and eager than before, always wanting to involve us and to include everyone.

But don’t they understand that by their coming they condemn us to death? Isn’t their cruelty clear to them, they who come with their new enthusiasms? The day spreads all around us; we are comfortable here. We live and die beneath the wide sky. But the edge of our world is trembling; a new epoch is beginning and it will reach us even here. The old world is rotting and the new world is coming. The old world rusts but the new world will regenerate us. The unregenerated will be regenerated, the new world is opening. But how can we be regenerated? How will acquire knew knowledges and new skillsets? There will be courses, we know that. There will be fees and bursaries to help us, we know that. There are funds set aside for the transition, schemes to get the sick and the tired back to work, we are assured of that. The leaflets are dropping through our letterboxes. A new world, all of us, black and brown and yellow and white, in the pages of the leaflets.

But where are we in the leaflet pages? Where are the unregenerated, with their heavy brows and dangling arms? Where are the Neanderthals in the pamphlet pages? What will become of our swamps and still water? What will happen when they drain our marshes? Only the Neanderthal knows of the distance from instant to instant. Only the Neanderthal knows of the space which stretches between intervals and of a whole life as an interval. Only the Neanderthal knows interval-space and interval-time, of the holes in space and time that are like the gaps between the arches of the railway bridge.

How can we explain our anachronism to the new breed? How can we speak of days and nights beneath time? What do we know of the new, we who are barely our own contemporaries? What can we know of initiatives and certainty, we who barely coincide with ourselves? How can we tell them that today, for us, is never yet today? How can we explain that we are not here, we who face them, that our gaze wanders elsewhere, that our souls are lost over swampy marshes? How will they understand our magma, our indetermination, and how each bleeds into each, how each of us is everyone and no one, how each Neanderthal speaks for all and for no one and yet not even of himself?

Laughter as our names are called and we step forward. Laughter as we pass along the corridor to the interview room. Why bother with us? Don’t you see it? We’ll die of shame soon enough, but meanwhile midges buzz inside our heads and mosquitos hatch in our heart. Why bring us here? Why call our names, we who were never anyone at all? Why when our names let speak who we are not? Laughter in our dull heads as we fill out your forms. What has this to do with us? It’s over, you win, it’s finished. We’ll make way, we’ll die soon, we know that, but why don’t you know it? Look at us – we are the old breed, and you are the new breed. Look at us – there is an absolute distance, an absolute divide. Our heads are buzzing and our hands are trembling.

The great stagnancy! What will they know of that, the new breed? How certain they are, how keen. But one day a newer breed will come and the margin they occupy will become infinite. One day, the breed beyond them will come and the rustbelt they occupy will divide time and divide space, setting each apart from themselves. One day, they will come, the new breed and turn the pages of their flipcharts before you in small classrooms. One day you will sit as we sit, mute and incomprehending, your attention dispersed, your focus lost, as the new breed tell you about the new world.

Old Europe

The welfare state recedes and we are beached on the great shore of the future. We are deprived of our element, our milieu. What are we to do now, on the new shore? What can we achieve, we who are stranded in the new world, in New Europe? New buildings are going up, but not for us. The rust belts are being regenerated, but not for us. How can we afford to live in the new buldings? How could we buy a flat in the regeneration zone?

We are the dross of the new world. They should leave us lying here on the shore, beached whales, creatures grown fat on the welfare state, creatures who passed through the great oceans of unemployment! It is a distant memory, but once they paid our housing benefit and our council tax. Once, but this is a long time ago, we were given an allowance for a cooker, for a television. Once, there was the fortnightly trip to the dole office for our unemployment benefit.

It wasn’t called Jobseeker’s Allowance, not then. Unemployment – the un was privative, but we experienced it as liberation. Unemployment, unemployed – we had broken ourselves from the world of the employed, we were cast adrift, but they made sure we had a fridge and a telephone. Cast adrift, but for our fortnightly giro and our rates relief and our housing benefit. Some of us were on the sick, some of the dole. But all of us went unnoticed under the same indifferent skies. Some of us cycled, some walked. Sometimes we gathered at the cafe in the sun. But that was before the regeneration. That was before they tore up the cafe and the squats and a new world was made.

What did we do in those long afternoons? Time was propitious; we had been given time, great swathes of time on the condition that nothing could begin. Time gave us everything because it was not yet itself, because we damned up something of time for ourselves.

Together we ate and drank in the sun. There were many of us, then. Many, because we hadn’t been picked off by the regeneration companies and the new supermarkets. What it was to walk the scruffy pavement by tower blocks that belonged in East Germany! What it was to lose oneself in the alleyways that resembled the great concrete labyrinths of Warsaw! We were lost, we knew that, but we had lost ourselves, and lived in squats in buildings long due for demolition.

Sometimes, it is true, the planners would come and squint upward at the towers. Sometimes plans for demolition would be announced, but it never happened. The city council was never organised enough. The Labour councillors were busy squabbling. The wrecking balls never came, and we were happy, rats in the maze, rats who’d lost themselves in long afternoons and winter sun. We hated politicians; but we could do – this was the time of Thatcher and Major. We hated them, but it was a casual hatred, one taken for granted. It was the backdrop of our lives, that hatred. It was diffused everywhere and we all agreed: Thatcher was the devil, Major was the devil’s accomplice. Happy alibi of hatred! Happy excuse for a life suspended!

In the long afternoons we read alone and came together at the cafe. Years passed that way. Years passed, one after another. A fortnightly cheque; our rates paid and our housing benefit paid, what more did we want? At that time, one spoke of structural unemployment. At that time, it made sense for some of the population to be permanently unemployment. True, we were not emburdened with children; we were still young; we were not like the miners who’d lost their livelihood, their way of life. In truth, ours was already a way of life. The long afternoon, discounts on cinema tickets and performances at the theatre, cheap bars and clubnights in condemned buildings.

Yes, ours was a lifestyle. Years passed; we read, we ambled, we cycled to and fro, we sat in the cafe in the sun. Those times will be forgotten, we know that. The long afternoon of Europe will be forgotten. Old Europe’s last summer.

Nothing stopped in ’97, the Labour victory. ’97 accelerated the change. Down came the towerblocks, down the condemned buildings. No longer was the city council lost in arguing with itself. Regeneration began; new European money came to our deprived area. Never mind us, the deprived who were happy in our deprivation. Orange-bricked housing appeared. The tower blocks disappeared, the condemned buildings disappeared and now spread estates of orange-bricked housing and the new supermarket.

What had happened? We were offered council housing, but away from the regeneration zone. We were to be dispersed, scattered to the four winds. We had lived there, we’d thought it wouldn’t change, we were happy in the rust belt and would have populated it until eternity, but it was changing around us. It changed, we did not change. We were rusting. Investment poured in to the rust-zones where we lived and we were moved away. Orange-bricked houses everywhere. Identical orange-bricked houses, decent accommodation, nothing to object to, everywhere. Not council accommodation, but private accommodation everywhere. Not for those who wanted a council flat, but for private owners and private investors.

House prices were low, it was said, but they were not low. Investors snapped them up, it was said, and the rents were driven up. How could we afford to live there? The regenerated world was not for us. Gently curving streets. Nothing above two stories. An orange-brick community centre. The cafe rehoused in an orange-bricked complex. The message was clear: leave. We left, what choice did we have? We were scattered to the four winds.

New Europe

Time began again. We’d lived outside of time, but now time recovered its direction. A new purpose filled the world, we could smell it. A new purpose, but not for us. European money, but not for us. Regeneration, but not for us. Now something else changed: a kind of despair descended upon us. We read, it is true, but there was no cafe at which we could meet. No cafe, no cheap pub. The old pub, all concrete and barbed wire, was demolished. A new orange-bricked leisure complex appeared in its place. A complex for those who lived in the new houses, and who shopped at the new supermarket.

Cycle lanes were painted on the roads and the new bikes appeared. Not the wrecked racers we used to cycle, not battered old machines with a rusty lock, but the new bikes, the hybrids and mountain bikes, with yellow-jacketed riders. With flashing rear lights and flashing front lights and yellow-jacketed and behelmeted riders. How efficient they looked! How purposeful! Even going about their leisure, they were purposeful! These are the new Europeans, we thought. We are the old Europeans. These are the new breed, the bargain city-break breed, the mountain-cycling-in-the-city breed, the property-investing breed, and we are the old breed. They’re probably scanning the new European countries in search of property bargains right now. They’re probably surfing on the net to find the new property bargains in Estonia, in Lithuania. They’re probably anticipating new E. U. member states in whose property they can invest.

New Europe was all around us, efficient and gleaming. New Europe was the new leisure complex, the new supermarket. And who were we? Perhaps we are the last of Old Europe, we thought. Perhaps Old Europe ended with us, we thought. Perhaps Old Europe was the secondhand paperbacks we exchanged. It was the compilations we made on cassette for one another. It was Gang of Four and The Raincoats. It was The Fire Engines and Magazine. It was Kafka and Canetti. It was that great tide of records and books on which we were borne.

Who wasn’t in a band? Which of us hadn’t moved here because of the example of bands that had come together from the long term unemployed? Who amongst us didn’t dream of being coalesced in this way, of finding ourselves in a band? Now you studied music technology at college. To be a musciain was a profession like any other: you were taught, there were lectures and modules. You were taught; everything could be taught; everything was a skill, and every skill was part of a skillset and the skillset was to be acquired to broaden your skills portfolio. Nothing was to be left to chance, we were all accountable. We were sent on training courses; we learnt what kind of people we were: motivators, team-players, facilitators or leaders. We learnt about quality and quality management. 

Slowly, before us, new Europe was opening, and we were invited to join the new Europe. Slowly, around us, a new world was opening, where everything could be taught, could be broken down into a school, where there was to be no drifting, no time unaccounted for, nothing that could not be gauged, measured and improved. All was optimisation, all was movement. Training was all; preparation was all. We were made ready, were braced for the new world. This will be a 24-hour city, we were told. Investment will stream through the city, they said, and it was already true. The old warehouses in the city were transformed. A new bar had been built in the wasteground beneath the railway arches.

The world was changing, and we were to be fitted to the new world, our skills would mesh with the skills required. Our skill sets would lock into those our employers would want. We learnt of our transferrable skills, of our skills portfolio. We learnt to construct a CV and to draft a letter of application. In truth we had been mobilised, we were part of the great mobilisation. Everything was ready, the world was ready, the city was ready. But we were already tired. How could Old Europe become New Europe? How could our bodies become New European bodies?

Our Old European heads ached; our Old European eyes were glazed over. The future had come; we were redundant in advance. The future was here, the city gleamed, and we were the dross of the past. How we prayed for a new recession! How we cried for a new wave of redundancies! Let’s go back to the rust belt. Let’s find a bolthole and settle there for the decade. Let’s find a small room to read our old paperbacks! But no sooner had we found another part of town than it was regenerated. Wherever we went, regeneration followed.

The more resourceful among us entered bids for community regeneration and art projects. The quicker and more able were able to seize and make good on some of the new funding opportunities. Community arts! Community projects! Oh dizzying activity! Oh new world, built with European money! All hail the new world, built with money from New Europe! Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the future broke over our tired bodies. We lay on the shore and the future broke over us. Here was the future, but not for us. Here was New Europe, but not for us.

[K-Punk has an interesting follow up. I’ve opened a new category to explore this topic further.]