I never know whether to tell this story or not.

There was a Christmas or two when I was in kinship care. If you don’t know what that is then it is when you are being looked after by a relative or some other friend of the family that isn’t your parents. It could be a Grandmother or an aunt or whatever. It never used to have a name – it was just a situation – but now they recognise it as being somewhat less than ideal.

My strongest memory of Christmas comes from that time. And, strangely, it isn’t a bad memory.

I lived in my aunt’s house. We had a lot of kids in that house. Five kids. Two bedrooms. All in single beds that took up so much space there was no seeing the floor. And we did it all on rotation. You changed bed so that you were near the door at least once a week… Or you were near the window. By chance that year I had drawn the short straw (so everyone thought) by being near the window on Christmas Eve. Yes, it was single-glazed and so the chances of there being ice on the inside of the window come morning were actually quite high but I didn’t care about that. It was even further to go to get to the toilet as well: Over everyone else, round the corner, down the stairs (all in the dark) and then back again without putting a light on or stubbing your toe or getting a row for being up… it was not, theoretically, the best bed.

But I liked it.

Because I got to look out the window.

And it was snowing. At that time Christmas was always a bitter/sweet affair. Yes there were presents. Maybe not the best presents. Maybe not as good as the presents sitting next to it under the tree that my cousins got. But there were presents. And I appreciated that. Although it wasn’t the best bit.

It also meant there was a fair chance of seeing at least one parent the next day and possibly two. Which I appreciated even more.

You would expect that to be the best bit. It wasn’t.

The best bit was the looking out the window: The endless soft silence of snow falling in the night as I sat, undisturbed and wrapped in a duvet, looking at a pristine world. There was no wind and so the large snowflakes fell straight downwards and disappeared into the separate blankets of the back gardens. The peace of that moment became all encompassing. The future held nice things, yes, but I didn’t even want the future to come – all I wanted to do was remain in that stasis and watch snow fall forever.

I tried to stay awake so that I could. I had no interest in seeing Santa – all I wanted to do was watch that scene: The falling snow acted, somehow, like a cold cloth on a fevered brow – a cooling calm. Snow brought ease and contentment. Snow removed worry and anxiety.

And how wise I was at that tender age. I wasn’t really bothered about the extra stuff I would get. All I really needed was a removal of anxiety and room to simply… be.

That’s still all that I want. The world is so noisy now. The anxiety levels are through the roof on all fronts and I don’t get the time any more to just look at the window and soak up the scene in silence.

Although it looks like the world is gearing up to provide a new level of horror and dismay I hope you all had a fine festive period. I hope this New Year brings you all that you would wish for.

Me? I’ll be hoping for peace but I’ll settle for snow and silence – at least once in a while.

Nope. it’s 30 years later. Which, despite being the most logical, inevitable and obvious thing in the world, I never saw coming.  Back then it just didn’t seem feasible that the world would reach 2018 at all and (when regarding it in the round) the imminent demise of the planet and human civilization had its pros and cons. Sure, we had all come to enjoy breathing and living but then some of that air was being used up by people like Bros singing ‘I owe you nothing’.

So, swings and roundabouts really. Yes, we were all living with the certainty of eventual incineration by apocalyptic nuclear holocaust but, you know, a world that can produce Die Hard can’t be all bad.

Looking back on it from a distance though 1988 was a very seminal year. Some stuff happened in 1988 that you never noticed at the time even if you had reached an age to give a shit.

Like what, Edison?

I’m glad you asked. Many of you will not remember 1988 in any great detail but you should because 1988 was the year we got the warnings. The faint tremors before the main quakes or, (for film fans) the ripples in the glass before the T-Rex turns up. You will be surprised (I was) to realise that back in 1988 the internet actually existed – The World Wide Web didn’t but the internet did and to celebrate that a guy created the first computer virus. It was called The Morris Worm after its creator and the poor chap had intended to map how big the internet was but only ended up shutting lots of it down for days and weeks. It cost millions.

That one event kinda sets the tone. Was it an existential threat? No, but it wasn’t a step forward either.

Like any year 1988 had its good and bad, mostly bad. If you give a vague description of something that happened that year then you could be talking about most years since.

Massive oil rig disaster – Piper Alpha in the North Sea, 165 lives lost but, you know, Deep Water Horizon and all that.

Plane downed by bomb – assailants unknown – No, not Flight 307, Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

Famous singer dies – in 1988 it was Roy Orbison but there have been a few since.

American politicians mired in scandal over foreign policy (I grant this could be any month not any year but in this case it was Iran/Contra)

Americans put half wit up for election…

A guy called Osama bin Laden started a new band called Al Qaeda. On reflection, bad thing.

But it wasn’t all bad. Or, at least, we didn’t think so at the time. Mikhail Gorbachev instituted an idea called Perestroika and the chances of that atomic annihilation receded somewhat. It led to Glasnost and eventually the Berlin wall coming down.

(In 1988, West Germany was still a thing)

After causing a million deaths the Iran/Iraq war finally came to an end.

The soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the first episode of Home and Away aired. I will leave you to decide whether these were good or bad.

It all sounds so incredibly distant and yet incredibly familiar at the same time doesn’t it? Even when humanity starts to fix things it just seems to be a precursor to f**king it up in a slightly different fashion.

Case in point – Northern Ireland

This was Northern Ireland in 1988.

I lived in Northern Ireland for a time, slightly before these events, and I remember this one vividly. It faded though as it was subsumed by its own consequences – there were counter attacks, reprisals… it was not good. 10 years after this the Good Friday Agreement was made and now, for the sake of brexit, it is all under threat. Moronic politicians in their London bubble who seem to think of a hard border as a minor inconvenience need to have longer memories. This was not a minor inconvenience. I have visited Northern Ireland since and in a tour around the town the guide stated in bubbly Irish brogue.

“You come at a wonderful time in our history. No one is getting shot these days. it’s brilliant”

That was one that was fixed and is being f**ked up again. There is some stuff that happened in 1988 that hasn’t been fixed. You won’t recognise this guy

This is Dr James Hansen in 1988. He looks a little different now but he is still kicking around to see the fruits of his labour – which I am sure he would love if there were any. What’s he doing here in this photo? He’s telling Congress that climate change is man made and is an existential threat to the planet. Or at least, to the humans and other animals fond of air, water and temperatures lower than Venus. 30 YEARS AGO!

We’ve actually known about global warming for a lot longer than that but this was the first time someone had spelled it out and put the science together in easy to understand language. 30 years and we are in worse trouble.

Why? Because we aren’t very good at seeing the big picture. We aren’t inherently honest with each other or ourselves. And when we do try and be honest people tend to look at us as if we are insane.

Back in 1988 the internet wasn’t ready for Facebook and the only way humans could get a raw and unadulterated look at themselves by shouting at each other was through the only type of social media we had back then. I give you Talk Radio.

Why not have a listen…

 

There;s a reason we keep saying ‘Same shit, different day’.

 

 

I work with young people a lot and some of them have had a pretty rough start in life. I could tell you stories but.. well, those are their stories to tell not mine. The thing is though that whether the young people have had all the advantages in life or not I have noticed a disturbing trend. More and more of them have not seen Star Wars. It used to be that in a class of 30 you would have 16 who had seen Star Wars – and I hate to say this dear reader, but that number has fallen – and it has fallen by a significant amount. We were working in a school in Drumchapel. Glasgow…

To Scottish readers I will not need to say more than Drumchapel. Billy Connolly used to mention it in his set. It was the very epitome of poverty and it is better now… but not that much better.

The class had about 28-30 kids in it. All taught by a young, good-looking Irishman named Michael (obviously) who had made a film with them the year before – and that film had won a prize – we were part of the prize. For a single afternoon we brought along the big cameras and tried to show them a little of what it is to be a film maker. It was tough going.

One of the kids (We’ll call her Senga) was so gallus (Glasgow word, look it up) that she could hardly function in normal conversation – seriously, she had such a compulsion to be a smart-arse (she was 10) that it was nearly impossible to get a conversation going. I shall, naturally, give you an example. We set them a task.

You have five shots to convey a single word. You can’t use that word verbally – you can’t write it down and show it. You have to think of a way of showing that is entirely visual. Senga was in a group of five or six. Their word was ‘Lost’.

So we set all six groups, including Senga’s, to work and some of them started furiously drawing pictures and writing down what they would do – but not Senga’s group. In fairness, they might have been ready to do it but just having Senga there rendered the task impossible. She wasn’t about to let a single statement or idea go unchallenged. So I went over to help them out. I wouldn’t be giving them ideas but if I could just tease some out of them…

‘What word is it?’ They whispered it to me – Senga, eyed me with suspicion, ‘Lost’

“Right, well what if you lost something? What would you do?”

Blank stares – as if the concept of losing something had never occurred to them and seemed unlikely ever to happen.

“What would you do, say, if you lost your schoolbag?” Enter Senga – this chat has gone on long enough.

“Ah’d git ma mammy to gie me anither wan.”

“Okay then – what if it was something you really cared about?”

And I cast my eyes around them all, trying to think of what these small alien creatures might give a shit about. And all I could think of was…

“What would you do” I asked “If you lost a tenner?”

“Ah’d git ma mammy to gie me anither wan” replied Senga, quick as a wink.

I looked to the ceiling and wondered ‘Were we like this?’ And we probably were. I know I was a smart-arse in p6 and probably at other times as well, but I think these kids are different in some regards – they have more, but I think they see less. For all that Senga has a big mouth and the occasional barb, for all that she access to the whole world through her phone she actually seems less aware of the world – and of what things mean.

I am not berating one little girl – she is merely an example of the many that I see – there are some who have harnessed the power at their disposal but they are few and far between. The others seem content to stare into their screens and somehow contrive to see nothing.

Which is why we try to teach them film literacy – how to look at a work and see what else there is apart from the obvious. To see what lies beyond the flashes, the explosions and the kisses.

In that Drumchapel class less than  5 of them had actually seen Star Wars and even those that had seen it had not really seen it.

What do I mean? Well, before you go congratulating yourself on your random superiority think of this ‘Have you REALLY watched Star Wars? Here’s the opening 3 minutes. It is a master work of film making.

 

So much is achieved in these 3 minutes I no longer feel guilty about loving this film from the very outset. For all those people in my life who have no idea what I do for a living here is a small sample of it, with a few ideas of things that I see when I watch this movie. The points made are nowhere near all I could talk about but they give you a hint.

I could talk about the sound design as they wait to see what comes through the doors, I could talk about the shadows that fall across the ship as it is consumed by the larger vessel. It’s a perfect example of efficient story tellling. Star Wars. First shot is people having a war with the backdrop of the stars – it doesn’t come much more efficient than that.

But for Senga (and many like her) it seems that the efforts made by film makers are almost beneath her. I’ve seen this time and time again in classes – the skills of the film maker go entirely unseen. Star Wars is a fairy tale and it has layer upon layer in its construction. But if I were to ask what it is about I would get…

‘A war in the stars, obvs!’

I don’t know what it is but the generations unfortunate enough to come after me seem to be missing out on their Star Wars moment. When the film came out originally it took months to get here from the USA. I had read the bloody book of the movie before I saw the movie. I remember it well. I spent hours looking at the 16 pages of photographs.

And that meant trying to imagine the movie before I had even seen it. I was playing the film in my mind and then watching it on a screen made all the bigger because I was so small. It was utterly enormous and transforming.

But now Senga watches things on her phone, or on a laptop or a tablet or (rarely) a TV. I asked a class yesterday what their favourite movie was – and got hardly one answer. Granted that these are not kids blessed with self-esteem or skills in public speaking but when asked ‘Okay, what was the last thing you watched?’ one lad answered with a fight clip from Facebook and most of the rest cited youtube.

Subtext, layers of composition, craft… all of these things are being diminished both in the written word (you want me to read??!) and in the moving image as the smaller screens take over. We are not getting art from these devices – they are merely distractions that do not expand our minds but shut them down. The constant babble a replacement for the difficulties of thought.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal, Philosopher, 1654

Those distractions are cheaply made. Two gamers playing Minecraft costs very little to produce and edit. What need have they for precision lighting or exact camera placement or complex sound design so that the movement behind the door reminds us more of an enormous beast than it does of machinery? They have no need. None at all.

It is then monetized – with each view being very cheaply paid for by advertisers.

But these are only the financial costs – the true costs are much higher and altogether unseen.

Attention spans diminishing, standards on a race to the bottom so that we can have ‘views’. In the same way that we have lost that passion for reading in many of the young so we will soon lose the ability to watch and understand an entire movie. Subtext will cease to exist for many.

Senga and her like have access to everything and so value nothing. Her media consumption comes in gobbled chunks that have no mental calorie content and instead of being satisfied they simply leave her needing more.

Of course, her Mammy can always get her anither wan.