Bertie Nailed it!

Back in the dawn of time when I was doing my art foundation at Barnet College I spent a lot of time stuck in traffic, listening to The Cure on my walkman as the 307 bus slowly made it’s way up an interminably long hill from Enfield Town, it used to drive me nuts as I was invariably late and knew I’d get glared at by one of the tutors who had taken a dislike to me. I had come to realise (as if I hadn’t already) that art was a not a poor person’s subject. My heart would sink on days where the tutors would get you to do material intensive things like produce sketch after quick sketch of belly dancers wafting their veils around Tudor hall. I knew that after I’d bought all the cartridge paper, I wouldn’t be having lunch that day. Trying to ‘better oneself’ out of a family that thought art and creativity was a nonsense was a constant battle and it that has never changed.

HG Wells was a clever guy, he dragged himself out of poverty that was much worse than mine, although his mother both believed in him and put the effort in to his attempt to crawl out of a world not far from indentured servitude, which must have helped. He was a staunch socialist from the get go and became a keen observer of people and human nature as many who start off dirt poor and invisible and see the very real barriers of class and society often are.

When I actually sat and read The War of the Worlds for the first time after growing up with the (still brilliant) Jeff Wayne album and the Fifties sci-fi movie I was amazed by how current it still is and how he understood that, even with the existential threat of an alien invasion, humans are gonna human. He described that drag up the hill through Barnet but with the horses and carts of the Victorian era and how chaos, panic and the inevitable squabbling of humanity caused carnage even before the alien war machines turned up. Wells was well aware of such tales from the Crimea and the savagery people showed to each other when they were forced to flee with finite resources and transplanted it to the suburbs of England.

Much of what I see around me now reminds me of the character of the artilleryman who the protagonist rediscovers once the Martians have done their worst. He goes into a grandiose speech about the creation of an underground utopia where humanity can start afresh, and get it all right this time, only for it to become apparent that all he’s actually done is dig a muddy trench and get drunk.

I, like Wells, have met many people like that deluded man, they have big ideas but very little understanding of how people or the world actually work. People rarely think outside of their parameters and when faced with a new problem or something they can’t possibly comprehend, they just do what they have always done,(and hope that, for once, it will actually make a difference) which to the soldier was get out a shovel and start digging.

I’ve seen so many people, that do the same thing, over and over again, regardless of the world showing them that their approach never works and their actions are a waste of time and energy. You can try and tell them otherwise and even show them another way around the problem but they get so stuck in their ways that change becomes impossible. All that you can do with people like that is turn your back on them and leave them to their inevitable fate.