snow patrol did this

Hi all,

A sentimental one rant I’m afraid.

It started soft, and ended hard. Not sure how that happened.

Blame Snow Patrol, blame Snow Patrol and that guitar sound, early on, that feels like tear drops on Run. Blame Snow Patrol and the synth line in How to be Dead that sounds like fairground memories that Hollywood says we all should have, but none of us do. Blame Snow Patrol and blame music in general.

I was talking last night about townies, about their white jeans and Ben Sherman shirts; in white and red: alluding to pink. And How Soon is Now came up; a song that means more to me than most others. I said - of townies - that you can tell a townie by the fact that they wouldn’t even enter into a conversation about how to dance to it, let alone know how to dance to it. It is beyond them, and rightly so.

How then, can you dance to How Soon is Now? The clues are in the song; you go to the club alone, you stand on your own and you go home and your cry and want to die. But that is not the point of this missive, this message and meander. My point is this: Music holds more sway over me than, in many cases, people that are part of my life; my new life, here in Bahrain.

I have taken, for example, to burning a hundred tunes on to a CD and then loading them on one or other of the computers at work. Thus I inflict my musical will upon those that share an office with me. Most of the time, it pans out; those that share my office are either indifferent or mute about my choices of tune. I am the universal in that I have; their have-not-yets are usurped and made irrelevant by my choices and decision.

But when one of my choosing is questioned or vilified, I see it fit to fight back in its defence far more than I see fit to question the unequal time that each of us spends in the office; each of us contributes to the ultimate creation of our magazine. It is easier, no, more desirable, to argue over the virtues of Snow Patrol, U2 or Otis Redding than it is to confront the realities of working here: Here, this island of dreams made sour through realisations of awkwardness; that no one else really cares, that you are the transient and that they will be here forever: no matter what.

And so, this is not a message home for reassurance, rather, it is a message home for reasons of clarity. I have spoken to some of you in recent weeks and felt; felt honestly, the warmth of envy emanating from cheeks pressed too closely toward the phone, that mine is better life than yours, that if you could only escape, then it would - all - be fine. This message is a warning, that whilst the grass is most certainly greener on the other side of the fence, at least, on your side of the fence, the grass grows naturally, from what nature - god - provides: it is not battled and fought into sublimation and acquiescence; nothing there happens because it is not in the best interests of, if not the majority, then at least a concerned and influential minority. Life here is about bending to the will of those that you know the name of - you cannot escape the name; McDonald’s is not the name here, nor Microsoft or Ford - these become franchises; something that the ruling family’s’ can wield, something they can use to brag about with the other families that own the labour laws, the legal system and civil liberties.

I started this by talking about music. At least you have music; it is at the very core of your daily lives. If it isn’t, it should be; even if it is Snow Patrol, even if it whatever chart pap you listen to at work. Bahrain is where music goes to die. There is one DJ, as far as I can tell, on Radio Bahrain, who has the kind of passion - and knowledge - that is surely required by law for one to be allowed a post drive time show on a national station. This is the crime, he gets two hours a week and tells his listeners that none of the music he plays is available here: download he says; and who cares if it’s legal. He studied in the UK and when I Interviewed him, he said, “We all come back [from studying] kicking and screaming, but how many of us actually leave again? I’m leaving, as soon as my family let me; I’m working on it. ...”

This is a dead society. But most people who have any power, state - firmly, and often loudly - that this society is just beginning.

But they value nothing that cannot be sold.

It does make me laugh - quietly and to myself, never daring to say it loud....

The Jews - who they all hate, and blame for everything - the hatred here is so complete and so facile that the anti Zionist society - and I swear this is not made up - ordered globe balloons for some kind of celebration and cut Occupied Palestine (Israel) out of them before they were inflated.

Anyway, the Jews have been parodied and despised for exactly the same reasons for centuries: that they value nothing that cannot be sold.

It is a fledgling and childish society; they are toddlers - who one could be forgiven for losing ones temper with occasionally.

What is the worst part of this rant? That Bahrain is by no means the most guilty of any of this. The average Bahraini doesn’t care about Islam in any global sense; they are mild and forgiving. They have a longer history than most of the GCC nations in dealing with outsiders and know the value of commerce. To the others though, those that have been holding the rest of the world ransom ever since the seventies, commerce is new. And the power that having a product that others want is new and they are milking it for whatever they can.

I saw King Abdullah of Saudi in London - meeting the Queen with full regal circumstance - and it sickened me; the BBC, that day, was no better than the excuse of a national press that we have here

”....and the queen showed him photos of a horse - Bank Note, I think - who was descended from a gift from his father; she showed him baubles and trinkets; gifts to her mother and grandmother: totems of colonialism and exploitation that he is only too keen to reverse: now that the shoe is well and truly on the other foot.”

I seem to have ended up in a very different place to where I started. And not really said very much in between. It happens.

Night all

XxX