THE LONELINESS OF THE MIDDLE AGED ROGUE

 

Many years ago, as part of a university degree i was completing (in English Literature with Linguistics), i wrote a dissertation on the so-called ‘Angry Young Man’ movement that emerged in the post-war years. This was a catch-all term for those ‘working-class’ writers, many of whom had taken some part in the military by way of National Service and had come, through their experiences, to the realisation that Britain was a sick state, riddled with poverty, divided along social lines and ruled by an elite autocracy, fashioned and shaped by way of a two-tier education system. One of the books i included in the 10,000 word essay was “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” by Alan Sillitoe, who also lived in the city of Nottingham. This was adapted in 1962 into a film of the same title, starring Tom Courtenay.

My university tutor, a proudly homo-sexual man with a predilection for dressing like a punk, was unenthusiastic about my choice of subject matter: he was of the view that the novels of Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey, John Osborne, Colin Wilson et al were trashy, pulp fiction and thus somehow unworthy of study at ‘degree’ level.

He was wrong: they were and remain, in fact, intelligent and valid literary representations of the male voices of that generation who saw through the modus operandi of  an oppressive state that seeks, at every turn, to control its population by Divide and Rule.

Yesterday, i visited a storage facility in Sillitoe’s home town where i have resided for the majority of my adult life. I was there to investigate the condition of my personal effects that had been stolen by a firm of ‘Receivers’ called Templetons, by way of their fraudulent ‘repossession’ of a friend’s house where the items were being held in storage following my own unlawful eviction of 4 November 2010. Amongst the items were several boxes of books dating back to my students days at Nottingham University, photographs from my past (including a year spent travelling round India), an oak desk, a king size bedstead and other personal stuff that i had accumulated from the time i became a ‘homeowner’ in 1994.

The entire collection had been dumped in a skip, buried under a mound of doors, kitchen units and mattresses and was irretrievably damaged.

In that moment, as i stood a-top the ten foot high skip into which my past had been dumped and destroyed, a-top a mini mountain of property, i realised, yet again, that the systems of control as manipulated by those privately-educated men and women working in the phony systems of ‘Government’, ‘Banking’ and ‘Law’ remain active now and similarly oppressive: the British Class System is alive and as sick in its nefarious objectives as it ever was.

Those who have read my piece on the formation of my own particular tale of a Void Mortgage may not be aware that the man who acted as my duplicitous solicitor was expensively-educated at one of Nottinghamshire’s private schools where he and his ilk are conditioned for their future roles as the controllers, managers and manipulators of the populace whom they ‘lord’ it over. I had met him via the sport of hockey which i played for a number of years, much to the amusement of some friends who regarded it as a pastime more associated with the public school system than a man who had been through a state-system of (mis)education.

In the film, Colin Smith, the central protagonist,  is sent to a Borstal where the Governor, himself an expensively-educated figure who runs the prison along the military lines of a public school,  encourages him to become a champion long-distance runner and arranges a Borstal vs Public School athletics competition.

Thus, sport becomes symbolic of the struggle of the individual and is portrayed as a metaphor of how society is controlled. Ultimately, Colin rejects his overtones and deliberately allow his ‘posh’ rival a hollow victory which is taken as a triumph of the individual, free-thinking and defiant working-class male.

Sport has been used as a backdrop for many films whereby the hero uses it as a means of escaping his impoverished background and, indeed, it has been a means whereby a man can demonstrably make material gain in the inequitous society into which he was born at a lower level of financial status.  Another classic example is the cinematic adaptation of David Storey’s “This Sporting Life” in which the hero is a rugby league player whose physical prowess is utilised by the wealthy owner of the professional club for whom he plays.

When we zoom out to view the hierarchical structure of professional sport we see how important a role it plays in the manipulation of society to a point where analogies arise with the Romans and those men who performed as gladiators for the entertainment of their ‘masters’.  George Orwell, himself a product of Eton, an elite factory for the production of controllers, commentated on its role in the lives of the ‘proletariat’ for whom,

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult….  their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”  Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell was acutely aware of how sport is used as a tool of oppression and distraction, entirely in keeping with the aims of the controllers:

 

Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century… It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. … Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. … In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one’s physical strength or for one’s sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.”

George Orwell, The Sporting Spirit

Thus, Beer and Circuses are the tried and tested means by which individual and collective frustrations are vented and their hold over the collective and indivdual psyche is one that the Rogue Male is acutely familiar with as it is a state that has also held him under its sway. A warrior needs to channel his energies and thus the rogue male, as i now realise it, embraced it with fervour: the sport of hockey was the means by which my anger with the class system was channelled and, in many ways, it has cost me dearly.

I was also a runner ~ not competitively but, like the character of Sillitoe’s novel, one who used it as a means of reflection and a source of developing a palpable sense of freedom: to run over terra firma, to be under the sky and blown by the wind gives rise to a wonderful sense of being unencumbered, of being released from the day-by-day vicissitudes of one’s life. When Smith, the working-class hero, pulls up short and allows his well-heeled competitor the hollow victory, he is sticking two fingers up at the Governor and all those who would attempt to control him and promote him as their man, their plaything, their puppet, if you like.

Yesterday, as i, the middle-aged rogue stood atop that skip and atop the detritus of my life thus far, it brought to a close that chapter of my life and with it came a palpable sense of release and quiet determination to continue in my quest for freedom from all those systems of control and tyranny that have attacked me through the aegis of the twin tools of oppression: Fake Debt and Phony Law.

When, on  July 14 2010,  Richard Inglis, another expensively-educated manipulator acting as a judge in a hearing at Nottingham County Court, attempted to gag me for objecting to the voiced lies of the Oxbridge-cultivated Barrister Ben Wood over his concerted attempts to misrepresent the facts and to steal my home, i asked him directly if it was not the case that the rules of the ‘game’ were designed for just such interjections. He replied that it was “not a game”.

If it’s not a game, then why are there so many rules?” I asked.

Richard, neither for the first nor the last time, fell silent.

Like the eponymous hero of Sillitoe’s book,  i ultimately lost the race and had my home of 16 years stolen by a violent and tyrannical state. I did not lose by fair means but by refusing to go along with the deceptive manipulations of a class system that regards me just as it regarded the ‘runner’ ~ a troublesome-jumped-up member of the proletariat who needs to be knocked down and taught a lesson.

Whilst the race may have been lost, the war is far from over and each and every one of those expensively-educated phony feckers who has attempted to bludgeon me into submission would do well to take note of that fact.