Wednesday the 16th, I think, 2010, 14:0?, Schiphol.
I woke up today thinking, ‘I can’t wait to sleep in Morocco’. So, here we are then, on the road again, getting ready to create a slither of separation anxiety between us and Amsterdam in the hope that we’ll appreciate her again. That and some sun and some sleep; the last 9 months have been tough enough.
Beevor’s Stalingrad begins, ‘“Russia’, observed the great poet Tyuchev, “cannot be understood with the mind”’. Ahead of us back in a queue a moment ago was a muslim man with a beanie on (I don’t know the official name), his wife was covered, but not the face. She was plump, he was lean, the dynamic of poverty, Jack Sprat and all that. The man’s cheekbones protruded and his eyes sank into his head. Beevor wrote of the soldiers’ faces as being ‘waxen and unshaven – the beards pathetically straggly from calcium deficiency’. (Beevor, p. 337) Hull is poor, sure, but only smack-heads look like that, and, not that it needs saying, their poorest are much poorer than our poor. His face was covered in dark stubble, his mouth scrunched with tension, his lower jaw was holding it up, protruding slightly as if it needed to counter-weight his permanent frown. I recognise the look from the Dobson men. It’s the scowl that stays motionless betraying the turmoil of the mind and therefore the readiness to strike, verbally or otherwise. You can see the same silent agitation in silverbacks at the zoo; the weight of the cage weighs them down like the weight of society does these men of impulse. Primitive is the word that springs to mind, but that’s wrong. Society enacts in war what the poor do in violence, Bill Golding said that, and so our shepherd is just badly dressed and badly fed and the tics of his present, the glazed cherry of his past, are betrayed by his tension.
