For Whom the Bell Tolls Read online

  Cities and suburbs are a firing range,

  The culture of blood sacrifice revives;

  Darfur is the first war of climate change.

  Millions die and still more millions flee

  From the great wars of the dark continent;

  Others, most desperate, are lost at sea.

  The tides are rising and the lives are spent.

  Where first the nuclear holocaust began,

  An earthquake and near meltdown in Japan

  Reveal to us as only Black Swans can

  The ultimate destructiveness of man.

  Black Swan events are those that cannot hurt us

  Because they never have, the world agrees,

  Until they do, like fire on phosphorous;

  The 9/11 attacks were some of these.

  They are the analysts’ ‘unknown unknowns’,

  The things we can’t predict and never will,

  They are not traceable on mapped war zones,

  But strike us from the blind side of the hill.

  We hear the beating of the Black Swan’s wings

  Which we thought couldn’t happen – we were wrong.

  We are beset by strange, outlying things,

  And one of these could be the Black Swan’s song.

  Middle Ground

  A quiet life may be a privilege,

  But not as much as one at the extremes

  Of peace and war and then of love and hate:

  The reasonable compromises died,

  Illusions don’t survive life at the edge,

  The middle ground is lost, a field of dreams,

  The ceasefires almost all disintegrate,

  And opposites attract and then collide.

  Caught in the crossfire, we should understand

  The middle ground is also no man’s land.

  Blue Skies

  ‘Cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.’

  Theodore Roosevelt

  They guarantee the sun at any price,

  The sand and sea and all that other stuff.

  I’m unimpressed: the sun’s just an old flame,

  The brochures oversell the paradise,

  The halcyon weather’s fine but not enough,

  And all blue skies are boringly the same.

  I’ll take rain in my face, wind in my sails,

  The thunder and the lightning heaven-sent;

  Give me a storm that’s worthy of the name:

  A force-ten fury is the prince of gales,

  Each gathering of clouds is different,

  And all blue skies are boringly the same.

  And so with us: there are no starring roles

  For those who promenade on Easy Street,

  Or bystanders who, to their lasting shame,

  Would join the ranks of cold and timid souls

  Who know not either victory or defeat.

  And all blue skies are boringly the same.

  White Christmas

  For fifty years we swallowed whole the myth

  Of Christmases romanticised by Bing,

  Just like the ones we used to know: the whiteness,

  The snow and schmaltz and sleigh bells of the dream.

  But then we were assailed by the real thing,

  Blizzards, black ice and misery therewith;

  Such dreadful weather it would strain politeness

  To say we were hacked off in the extreme.

  The deep mid-winter slid from bad to worse

  And hammered us for weeks until we knew

  The implications of an ancient curse:

  The one that says may all your dreams come true.

  Screens

  Flat screen or hand held, such a multitude

  Of images and messages cascade

  In flickering rectangles of light and shade,

  Which is the way reality is viewed.

  This is no window on the world, my son,

  But just a screen in the old-fashioned sense,

  An obstacle and electronic fence

  Between the eye and what it chances on.

  And such a box of tricks, for we will find

  In the real world there’s no returning whence

  We came – and that’s the vital difference.

  We pass this way but once. There’s no rewind.

  The Kindle

  Do you remember there were books?

  At first attracted by their looks,

  Then we would open them like lovers

  For mysteries within their covers.

  We found in them a light divine,

  A soul, a spirit and a spine.

  They taught us history, art and Greek,

  To write, to think, to woo, to speak,

  Yet sadly they’re in such decline

  That they’re becoming as antique

  As spinning wheel and spindle;

  And we’re left with the Kindle,

  Where people on the Underground

  Read slabs unprinted and unbound,

  And Paradise will not be found

  Nor God’s grace shine around.

  The Blogosphere

  A curse of malediction plagues the net.

  It should be a mainstream of our discourse,

  But bloggers pour their vitriol through its gutters.

  Their ill-intentioned dialogues beget

  A wilderness of insult and a force

  For mischief on a planet of the nutters.

  There are two rival theories to explain

  Such incoherent incivilities:

  Either they’re due to drugs and alcohol,

  Or else the fingers far outpace the brain;

  While digits furiously pound they keys,

  The faculty of reason’s gone AWOL.

  Illusion

  This is included in honour of my grandfather Robert Bell, former news editor of the London Observer. It comes from his book of poems After-thoughts, published in 1929 by Methuen, who described them as touching ‘with feeling and fancy upon life’.

  The white house glimmers through the trees:

  The grave and gentle candles shine.

  ‘Here, surely, here at last is peace’ …

  Perhaps he thinks the same of mine.

  Lines

  Adrian Bell, Robert Bell’s son and my father, was a lifelong, unwavering and supercharged romantic. His lines ‘on seeing a pair of porcelain figures overshadowed by a red rose’ were included in his Poems, published by Cobden-Sanderson in 1935.

  He leans to thee with fragile courtesy,

  His eyes star-brightened by Love’s breathing wing:

  O tip-toe trance of soft encountering!

  Thy shady bower

  Of many-petalled flower,

  Which, Nature’s fantasy, is full as fair as thou;

  But even now

  It droops with prescience of mortality.

  When Troubles Come

  I booked a train, but then a cursed fault,

  A signal failure outside Bletchley station,

  Brought every Euston service to a halt

  Across the board – a total cancellation.

  And so instead I drove my ancient Rover

  On what became a motorway too far;

  A broken clutch announced the journey over,

  And desperate, I hired another car.

  Then, where the road and rail ran parallel,

  I saw from my expensive limousine

  The trains were thundering past and going well,

 
While I was in the traffic jam from hell.

  I sat awhile amid this dismal scene,

  In contemplation of what might have been

  And in distrust of every wheeled machine.

  Shakespeare was right and prescient and wise:

  When troubles come they come not single spies.

  TGV

  President Pompidou once chided his countrymen for their ill humour – ‘la morosité française’.

  I’m suffering from visitor’s tristesse,

  Because the French appear to have a need

  To travel in high dudgeon at high speed;

  And since I would prefer a gentler pace,

  I tend to find the Train à Grande Vitesse

  Is not so much a journey as a race

  Run by them all with great morosité,

  Competing and complaining all the way.

  So from the Gare de Lyon to Marseille

  I’ll take the stopping service, if I may.

  Anagrams

  A man of words drew on his wide experience

  Of texts and transcripts over many years,

  To note the irony that Presbyterians

  Is letter-wise the same as Britney Spears.

  Our wordsmith, waxing spiritual again,

  Was able likewise to reverse the polar

  Opposites of sacred and profane:

  He turned Episcopal to Pepsi-Cola.

  But what did for him was a metaphor

  For tyranny both functional and titular,

  When he unwisely said that Mother-in-law

  Was virtually the same as Woman Hitler.

  Tory Dictionary

  Satisfactory

  Is a True Blue who likes things as they are,

  Conservatory

  Is one who strives to keep them up to par,

  Inflammatory

  Is one whose rhetoric has gone too far,

  Desultory

  But, lacking staying power and stamina,

  Transitory

  Has vanished from the scene, a shooting star.

  Territory

  Is where a Tory comes upon new ground,

  Ambulatory

  And reconnoitres it, by walking round,

  Inventory

  Then makes a list of everything he’s found

  Nugatory

  And throws it out, deciding it’s unsound.

  Offertory

  Is a Conservative with ample coffers,

  Predatory

  Is one who grabs what life’s unfairness offers,

  Congratulatory

  Is for all those whom self-doubt never bothers,

  Derogatory

  The most nay-saying and ill-natured of us.

  Accusatory

  Is one whose common charity is nowhere,

  Amatory

  Is far too loving for a Tory – whoa there!

  Suppository

  The best advice is, let’s not even go there.

  Kurt Schork

  Kurt Schork, the Reuters reporter in Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995, was killed in Sierra Leone in 2000.

  They turn up in their combats, clean and pressed,

  Equipped with body armour, suave and willing

  To go to war even in the cannon’s mouth.

  But then it starts and they are unimpressed,

  They’d rather keep their distance from the killing.

  The war is to the north and they head south.

  There’s something to the risk of being killed

  That tends to put the fashionista off;

  He looks the part over a war zone beer,

  In showmanship he is uniquely skilled,

  But face to face with a Kalashnikov

  He likes to change his mind and go elsewhere.

  But there’s another who won’t talk so much;

  Scruffy and unkempt he quietly loiters

  Unrecognised and, cut down in his prime,

  Has done the business honestly. One such:

  The unsurpassable Kurt Schork of Reuters,

  One of the heroes of my life and time.

  From Sarajevo to Afghanistan

  He was the guiding light and exemplar,

  Conscience in residence of the press corps,

  A good reporter and still better man,

  Until the day he took a risk too far

  And perished in a futile foreign war.

  Reporters’ Retreat

  We noticed they were booted and were spurred

  In case the wars that they dreamed of occurred.

  They looked the part and talked it more or less,

  Flak jacketed and ready for combat.

  They were impressive in their fluency,

  But offered little more than style and dress.

  The truth is they were not where it was at,

  Their war reporting was a kind of truancy;

  They worked within the green zones and without

  Apparently the will to venture out;

  Their offices were underground – and that

  Hardly proclaimed the heroism of the press.

  Censorship

  The television networks are programmed

  With guidelines that restrict and curbs that chafe;

  They’ve given up on ‘Publish and be damned’,

  And substituted ‘Censor and be safe’.

  Their managements don’t see war as it is,

  But rather as a breach of etiquette;

  Opinion polls are paramount in this:

  The viewers wouldn’t wish to be upset.

  And if we field men ever sought to show

  The truth about a war, or something like it,

  The upper floor invariably said no:

  The editors would shake their heads and spike it.

  In zones of war and conflict where the press

  Are sent to make some kind of reckoning,

  We falsified – I literally confess

  I never really showed a bloody thing.

  So Ministers of the Crown who never

  Perceived the truth, because the truth was hid,

  Saw warfare as a glorious endeavour:

  ‘Let’s go for it,’ they said – and so they did.

  Tim Hetherington

  Tim Hetherington, British photographer and film-maker, was killed in Libya in April 2011.

  We spend our lives in trivial pursuits

  And little kingdoms much like King Canute’s.

  Even our causes are so close to home

  They frankly don’t amount to all that much:

  The right to demonstrate, the right to strike,

  The right to privacy, the right to roam,

  Flight paths, foot paths, wind farms and the like:

  These are the so-and-so, the such-and-such.

  But there’s another harder, darker side

  About which we know the square root of damn all,

  A world of forced migrations, genocide,

  The suicide of Mladic’s own daughter,

  Of wars for scarce resources, oil and water,

  Of jihadists with children in their thrall,

  And continental and industrial slaughter.

  This was the world, extreme and actual,

  In which he lived as witness and reporter

  Bearing the torch of truth, only to fall

  The victim of a random Libyan mortar.

  The Death of News

  ‘The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cun
ning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability’

  Nicholas Tomalin of the Sunday Times

  News-chasing then, we’d hit the airport running,

  Often in just the clothes that we stood up in,

  With everything to gain, nothing to lose;

  A way with words and certain rat-like cunning

  Was all it took, said our Nick Tomalin,

  And what we did looked, read and felt like news.

  But though the new technology abounded,

  The adventure ended, swiftly and discreetly,

  On someone’s orders, none of us knew whose;

  The death knell for real journalism sounded,

  When health and safety did for it completely:

  It died and was replaced by pseudo-news.

  Acts of self-harm and sabotage took place

  As readerships declined and staffs down-scaled.

  Abandoning inherited values,

  Managements went on a wild paper chase

  To find a new agenda – and they failed.

  Whatever else it was, it wasn’t news.

  How shamelessly they harvested this stuff;

  Remember Holly, Jessica and Madeleine?

  The media army camped at Praia da Luz,

  For whom any old rumour was enough,

  Exploiting private grief for corporate gain?

  A fitting term for it was necro-news.

  These days they don’t report, they just perform,

  Waving their arms in fake sincerity;

  Hardly a gimmick that they won’t refuse:

  Lip gloss for men is actually the norm.

  What’s missing is the authenticity,

  The being there which is the heart of news.

  They’ll prance and strut before a video wall,

  Or cower within the Green Zone in Iraq,

  ’Twixt frying pan and fire it’s hard to choose,

  The circus masters have them in their thrall.

  We know full well that there’s no going back,

  And that is why we mourn the death of news.

  (Published in the British Journalism Review, March 2010)