The Social Acceptability List 2015

As the New Year approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition - IT'S IN! Ties With China!

Since China went red, the West has wanted to shun it. But money is the loudest voice in politics, so gradually we’ve had to accept that China is here to stay. The first step was recognising, in 1971, that the communist People’s Republic of China was the China that got the seat at the UN, at the expense of the Republic of China, which is now in the (mostly) unrecognised state of Taiwan. Since then, money has spoken more and more until, finally, the Chinese are building power plants in the UK.

It’s an irony that the Tories have been far more gung-ho about China, while Labour (who traditionally would be seen to be closer bed-fellows) have been more hesitant. First we had George Osborne talking about how his daughter is learning Mandarin, hailing it as the language of the future (not without reason). Then, for a good while, we had an admiring commentary on Chinese (and generally eastern) education. I live in China, and I know about Chinese education, and it’s a rough, relentless, dispiriting slog. It stifles creativity; it promotes mindless conformity. It’s also completely inseparable from their overall culture, and works seamlessly to keep an abundance of people from getting too rebellious. Chinese students memorise much, but learn little. But their exam results are fantastic.

But their fantastic exam results aren’t the cause of their economic success. That, rather, is due to the cheap labour, long hours (many unpaid), few regulations, fear of asserting any rights, and the sheer numbers they have. It’s an economic rise led by the cruel whims of the markets and backed by investment of the state, and (for its sins) it’s taken many millions out of absolute poverty. The British governments’ similar willingness to leave everything to the market, and to sell out their own labour force for cheaper labour in China, is one of the reasons for the UK’s economic troubles.

This year, the Tories finally filled the bathtub of hypocrisy and slipped in to the bubbly warmth of a Chinese money spa. It materialised as a full-blown, Chinese state-owned enterprise in the UK for energy. Another high profile partner in the UK energy game is EDF, the state-owned French company. All this while taking the axe to public funding of services, and maintaining the narrative that publicly run organisations are costly, bureaucratic and wasteful, and should be avoided at all costs.

John McDonnell, in another attempt to ruin his career, attempted to highlight this irony with his Little Red Book prop, his dig at Osborne’s new friendship with the Communists. It turned into a playground argument about who liked Mao more.

Around the same time, China's leader Xi Jinping came to meet our duel leaders, Cameron and the Queen. The red carpet was laid and a propaganda coup was shown for all 1.3 billion Chinese back home. I saw the news reports on the subway TVs. The Chinese have a great fondness for the UK (despite being on the receiving end of British colonialism), and though they may be overworked and denied many rights, they are proud of the strength of their country. The British as allies was seen as vindication.

China still gets mocked. Its rich shoppers get mocked at Christmas; its taste for gambling and luxury is mocked as a great communist irony. Its policies get roundly criticised in the media, but not from politicians. They’ve taken the Saudi approach: let’s not let morality get in the way of a good heist. I dare say China will become more socially acceptable in the political sphere as time goes on, to the extent that - if I may make a little prediction - the efficiency of single-party power will challenge the merits of troublesome democracy that we currently cling to, and eventually usurp it.

The Social Acceptability List 2015

As the New Year approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition... IT'S OUT!  - Global Warming Denial.

Moving down the social acceptability list is global warming denial. Indeed, the change of the term from climate change “sceptic” to “denier” is nothing if not a symbol of its removal from social acceptability. As the evidence and arguments roundly mock UKIP, America’s Republicans, and right-wing media, their own arguments have shifted from “Does it exist?” to “Are humans responsible?” When the evidence shoots them down on that one, they point out that China and India aren’t doing anything about it, so why should we? Each defeat in the argument leads to another phoney point, another goalpost move, leaving observers to conclude that these ‘sceptics’ are no more than reactionary idiots who can’t accept that they were wrong. But don’t expect them to lower their arms too soon; rather, as the debate shifts we can expect new villains in the deniers’ crosshairs: aliens, sheep, the unemployed...

A few days ago, I heard a UKIP woman on Radio 4’s Any Questions begin her spiel with “Well... the climate’s always changed, the question is whether it’s human involvement that’s causing it now.” The groans from the audience let out a huge, collective “Get over it!” The same response, though slightly more muted, greeted the Daily Mail cartoonist, Quentin Letts, on Question Time. A lot of the support of narrow-minded parties and newspapers depends on convincing their listeners that these ‘new-fangled fads’, like social media, craft beers or, indeed, global warming are nonsense. “In my day all you needed was a packet of Chum Chum Goodies Gums in your back pocket, and I doff me hat to the postman and off we trot!”

But the Earth is round, the holocaust really happened, and global warming is real – get over it. So, while the climate summit’s been going on in Paris recently, deniers have been far less vocal than in the past. Global warming denial, henceforth, is on its way out.

The Social Acceptability List 2015

As the New Year approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition... IT'S OUT!  - Privilege

Like a stain on the lapel of an expensive suit, privilege is being shunned like no tomorrow. There is nothing worse than being privileged now; indeed, the privileged are just about the most underprivileged people around, the poor buggers.

Privilege, in the dictionary, means a right or benefit given to some people and not others. In the world of the commentariat, privilege was, until recently, a word saved for those of the Bullingdon Club, the Oxbridge or Ivy League elite. There was also the underprivileged, those stuck on their estates, unable to enjoy social mobility. Then there was everyone in between. But that left those in between apparently unaware of their own privileges, and able to talk about their own problems without reference to those with bigger problems. Now, with some tinkering with the definition in feminist discourse, privilege has morphed into something of a currency. You have more or less of the stuff; there are nation, gender, race or class forms of it. You can collect them all! But you can’t trade because it’s inherent to who you are.  

And that’s a problem because if you’re privileged but don’t recognise it, you’re at fault. Hence, if you don’t read the latest cultural theory, or use Twitter, or read Buzzfeed, or follow memes, and you don’t know the term White Privilege (for example) then yes, sorry, you’re part of the problem.

But I’m here to alleviate your guilt by informing you of your privilege. Let’s take Whiteness for an example. White privilege manifests in the favourable treatment white folk (in our western societies) get with the police, at schools, at interviews, and so on, and the deeper rooted cultural expectations of beauty and other things like who is committing terrorism. It means that when shit goes bad for white people, their race isn’t the reason; instead, it’s their own stupid fault, which is comforting. As a sociological concept, it’s broader than any one person; it’s an overview which attempts to consolidate statistics and social phenomena about pay and crime and whatnot.

But it’s not just whites. Are you able-bodied? Then you’re privileged. Heterosexual? Privileged. Middle class? Privileged. Male? Privileged. Do you subscribe to the gender that you were assigned at birth? Privileged. If you’re a middle-class male graduate student, but you’re gay and lost a leg in a terrible accident, you might come out neutral. Like Top Trumps, you can play against your friend to see who is more privileged, but you won’t be friends for long, because this privilege stuff really riles people up.

Have no doubt that privilege is a disparaging term. This is nothing new – the underprivileged have always taken a pop at the privileged in our society, especially so in the underdog culture that we have in the UK. But a new venom has hit the scene, a new haughty venom, as the term has gained new meaning. Most of those who are keen on the white/male privilege label seem to be well-educated, white (and often men) and spend most of their time explaining to the less enlightened whites out there why the label makes sense, and why the allegedly privileged are at ‘fault’ for not acknowledging it. Those who write with authority on the matter have the privilege of having a voice that people listen to, and sometimes a paycheck at the end of it. Buzzfeed and Huffpost journalists often claim to have had some kind of spiritual awakening where they noticed finally how privileged they are, and have a newfound sense of pity for non-privileged people, on whose behalf they now talk. YouTube videos showing social saints explaining their own awakening are often highly attractive, articulate and confident. Their Christ-like quest is simply to let their readers know how privileged they are, but don’t worry, you’re not being asked to give it up; just to accept it, be humbled. Those on Twitter who pick up the term and run with it are often more crass, and online bickering ensues, leading to death threats. Good work, people.

I can’t be the only one to notice the irony of the privilege of those given the authority to talk about privilege. And I’m not - indeed, writers who write about privilege often write about their own privilege, making the whole article wonderfully self-involved. At the level of discourse, the privilege debate reaffirms whites on the top of the pile, providing another delicious irony. It doesn’t just recognise imbalances; it reinforces them and then adds a dash of moral superiority. It works thus: White, heteronormative, patriarchal, Western cultural expectations frame the debate, and the “unprivileged” are pitied for not being able to join in, like orphans or the endangered pandas of Western China.

Pity is most inert of emotions.

But there is action! “Check your privilege” is something that you are encouraged to do by social justice warriors, who spend saving the world one blog post at a time. It comes from the idea that you can work out how privileged you are by doing a checklist. Am I white? Now, let me just check that... Yes, I am. And so on. If you say something that belies your ignorance about social injustice, such as “So many people doing Christmas shopping in ASDA tonight, it was crazy!” then your more thoughtful, less ignorant friend should patiently and gently remind you that the term ‘crazy’ is a disparaging term towards those with mental illness, and could well trigger a bout of sadness. If appropriate, then he or she (or neither) might then explain to you their own experiences with depression before concluding by telling you to ‘check your privilege’.

It’s a great example of how to conduct an enterprise of social transformation, while alienating the largest proportions of it.

In conclusion I’d like to turn our attention to some of the more insidious forms of privilege which no one has seemed to notice, but which are tearing our society apart. I think they are self-explanatory. These are non-ginger privilege, south-facing privilege, live-by-the-seaside privilege, average height privilege, car privilege, bike privilege, higher than minimum wage privilege, no student loan privilege, mobile phone privilege, smart phone privilege, 20-20 vision privilege, sibling privilege, free from halitosis privilege, skinny privilege, drug free privilege, cheap drugs privilege, no allergy privilege, wifi privilege, and live-near-a-Tesco-Express privilege.

---------------------------p.s.

Many articles about privilege are irritatingly self-indulgent. See here for a more refreshing one about the history of the term in feminist literature, and it’s evolution as an internet phenomenon. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/check-your-privilege

The Social Acceptability List 2015

As Christmas approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition... IT'S IN!  - Voting out the Box!

Across the UK, US and Europe, the left/right divisions are falling apart and small, sometimes esoteric, parties are finding their support base shoot up. What’s the reason for this? Well, rolling news informs us immediately of any tragic event which occurs anywhere, painting a picture of a world in the throes of disintegration; social media gives us the opportunity to react in soundbites and little more, which makes simple solutions seem reasonable; the political establishment’s acceptance of neoliberal capitalism has led to resentment over a lack of choice and growing inequality. At to that the fact that they’re all boring – those politicians –  really not what we’ve come to expect from people on TV.

Hence the rise of the charismatic, fumblingly entertaining dingbat. Boris Johnson was an early version of this new political lifeform, amusing enough to be on Have I Got News For You. Nigel Farage struck a chord by drinking pints when journalists were there. Those watching the evening news were able to look at that pint, then look down at the pint in their hands, then look back at the pint on the TV, and slowly, like a rusty cog finally slipping in to place, conclude: My God! He’s a bloke! All sorts of phantasmagorical deductions could thus be inferred about the righteousness of his policies.

Boris won the mayor prize and Farage has had some good election results here and there, but the Out of the Box Politician Version 2.0 is a more recent phenomenon, and it’s been catapulted right into the mainstream, partly as the dramatic, fairy tale ascendency of Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour gave people the opportunity to join the party on the cheap, and when they joined they brought their democratic voice. It was a voice for Corbyn, the conscientious backbencher more at home on the picket or in the protest than at the dispatch box. There’s been a severe media backlash, and the polling suggests support for Corbyn is low, but if people want a “New Type of Politics” – and these cynical bastards who hate politicians should! – it’s out there.

The next box-circulating politician to have recent gains is the Front Nationale’s Marine Le Pen, who has even wheeled out her brainwashed daughter to put a fresher face on the brand. Indeed, the Pens get prettier with every generation, and the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is so ugly that he’s been in Le penalty box since earlier this year. The Front Nationale capitalised on the recent bombings in France and did well in the 1^st round of regional elections, but the French saw more sense in round 2.

Elsewhere in Europe, fear and austerity has produced a Christmas hamper of political choice. Greece voted in the anti-austerity Syriza, and the Spanish election showcased to new parties, including Syriza’s political brethren Podemos, who did well enough to share power. On the British left you have pro-independence and anti-austerity parties of Scotland and Wales, and the ever-present-but-going nowhere voice of the Greens. At the other end of the spectrum we’ve seen the expansion of the English Defence League and Germany’s Pegida. These groups shroud themselves in the colours of patriotism in a lazy attempt to come across as something less than racist, but fail.

Whatever their political lean, a common trend is the loss of political slickness that goes with ‘centrists’ trying to appeal to the mainstream. The recent traditions of highly funded political campaigns, of spin and double-speak, are losing ground to a new bluntness, a man-in-the-pub vocabulary, and the use of social media to get the message across. The mainstream is splintered, and entropy is setting in.

Of course, the crowning achievement of the out-of-the-box mentality which has become socially acceptable in our wretched age is, of course, the Buffoon himself. He’s half man, half ape, and half asleep. He’s got the body of a man, but the mind of a foetus. True, he isn’t really socially acceptable in the UK, and perhaps not in the USA, but he is a Republican candidate, and the leading candidate at that. In many ways he is the True Republican, the spirit of the Republican Party melted down, purified and chiselled into a rich, male, blond ogre. He has, in the UK, his female accomplice – TV personality Katie Hopkins – who gets wheeled out on morning TV because audiences love to watch people they hate. Recently, a petition has sought to ban him from the UK for fear that he and Hopkins might spawn.

Social Acceptability List 2015

As Christmas approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition... IT'S IN!  - War!

War never really goes away, but it’s back in a fresh new suit and on the rampage. Bush’s self-prophesising War on Terror is reaching its golden era, and the entire UN have come together to wage it. Everyone is against Deash – even other jihadi groups. That much is agreed on. After that it gets hazy. The USA, Turkey and France hate Assad, who hates them back. But both of them hate Daesh more. Assad’s friends, Russia and Iran, hate Turkey and the West, probably more than Daesh, but they’re trying to play nice. The Saudis want to destroy Assad because he’s the wrong type of Muslim. They’re ambiguous on Daesh and possibly have income streams going to them. But America really likes the Saudis, who can do no wrong in their eyes. The stateless Kurds are hated by Turkey for being separatists and by Assad for being effective fighters, and hence also Russia; but they are friends of the West, even though they occasionally kill them in friendly fire. Israel, that lightning rod of regional tension, is quietly hating everyone, and hoping they destroy each other.

It's like a Christmas dinner where that recently released paedo uncle has shown up unexpectedly, and everyone has different ideas about how to get him to leave.

Into this maelstrom the UK have proudly plodded, promising rather vacantly to play its part. When your justification for going to war becomes little more than an analogy of helping your friend when he falls in a puddle, you can pretty much guess that no one’s got a clue what’s going on. Cameron might see it has a part of his legacy – war worked for Thatcher, after all; but those isolated wars of the past are no more. Daesh have instilled such fear, and it’s been duly disseminated by a loyal media, so war is back, and don’t expect it to go anywhere.

Social Acceptability List 2015

As Christmas approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition... IT’S IN! - Islamophobia

It’s been a good year for the adherents of Islamophobia. Islamist fascists have made great strides in convincing the west that they are the true voice of Islam, even while failing to convince ordinary Muslims, and often killing them instead. There’s been wrangling over terminology – the refugee/migrant palaver, the Daesh, Isis, Isil, IS conundrum. Anyone who seeks to remove the Islamic flavour from the word is deemed to be simply politically correct by those who’d prefer to associate Islam with violence. And the people, especially those reading the Mail, the Sun and the Express, are lapping it up.

Since 9/11 Muslims have been battered like the proverbial piñata, and yet for all the nasty rhetoric, terrorism in the name of Islam hasn’t stopped. It turns out that hurling abuse at a group doesn’t stop the violently inclined members stop being violet. The same could be said for bombs. You might say, it simply causes and entrenches division... but I’ll leave that type of conclusion to the strategists, who seem to have the situation under control.

This year in London we’ve had a black woman racially abusing a Muslim woman on the bus. I mention that the abuse hurler was black because, as a group, black people have also had a hard time of it and often still do. Irony, anyone? In other news, an old man on the platform in the Underground recently tried to push a Muslim woman under a train. Thankfully, he was as weak of body as he is of mind, and couldn’t muster up the strength. Politically-motivated, violent or abusive retaliations towards Muslims isn’t deemed to be terrorism, but rather the wanton acts of mad people. Terrorism per se is literally, glaringly, a label saved for the bearded or veiled Arab type.

Commentators have, for a number of years, taken shots at Muslims. Richard Dawkins is one of the most notorious, and readily gets a torrent of abuse redirected at him. Dawkins’ problem is with religion itself, fair enough, but the targets he chooses come across as deliberately inflammatory. Recently he compared the number of Nobel prizes which have gone to Trinity College Cambridge with that of the entire Muslim world; more recently he’s been gleefully picking apart the claims of the Muslim bomb-clock kid in the US. Dawkins is a clever man who doesn’t want to cause offence, but doesn’t care if he does. His followers, however, are not clever; they’re ordinary people who simply hear ‘Muslims are bad’.

Just in time for Christmas, the big D, Trumpman, the Donald himself, has decided that closing the border to Muslims, all of ‘em, will provide some kind of solution to the threat of - wait for it – terror. This is so barmy that few opponents even bother argue against it – they respond with platitudes about it being against American principles, or how Trump is a joke or a fascist. Cameron said it was simply quote-unquote “wrong”. But while people are always hearing about things that are simply wrong, Trump proposes a tangible thing – a wall! For those with fewer brain cells than spouses, it’s genius!

In China, where I live, islamophobia is practically built-in, partly due to the political issues in the Muslim province of Xinjiang. As with a number of political disputes around the world, some of the Uighur have responded to Beijing’s repression with violence. The result, combined with rolling world news and its obsession with Islamic terrorism, has become the mantra that ‘Muslims are violent’. Some westerners I have met here, who are not recipients of Beijing’s propaganda and should know better, are also islamophobic, claiming that “Muslims are bad” is somehow self-evident. 

There are of course the defenders. There are those who hurl abuse back at the bigots; there are those who go to help refugees in Calais or make them feel welcome in the UK; there are those that argue that alienating the group en masse will only make the situation work. We hear less about these folk, but we do hear some. And why? Because people being nice to Muslims is newsworthy. It’s the other side of the coin, the proof that Islamophibia has hit the mainstream.

Scourge of the Trail, Part V

Previously on The Scourge (link to part 1).

Part 5: Dick Whittingtons in Reverse.

With haste we rose and pushed the lingering few items into our backpacks, and Dave offering a groan under the weight which provided a kind of departing toast. My bag, by comparison, was featherlight: I had painstakingly removed anything which wasn’t essential, and was still thinking of shaving a few bristles off my toothbrush to save even more weight. I foresaw an afternoon of pleasant greenery, blue skies and trickling creeks, ruined by the unbearable, Sisyphean load on my back. I was having none of it. My wilderness was going to be an unspoiled, Wordsworthian Babylon.

We had a few errands to run before our midday train to the north. Principally, I wanted a new t-shirt or two. I had grown envious of two of Dave’s t-shirts, a pair of Merino wool beauties which, supposedly, dried superfast. This was precisely the type of thing that should be in my pack. Down Kensington High Street we found ample hiking shops and even ampler prices. Eventually I picked up some cleverly scientific-sounding boxer shorts at Uni-qlo and left it at that.

Our train departed Euston at 1pm. The sun was high and beautiful and we arrived in early, so we ate a sandwich in the seated area just outside. Dave had recently become vegetarian, I discovered, and I wondered how this would affect the meals I was hoping he would make for me. I crossed bacon sandwiches off the list and shot a glare at Dave, but said nothing.

As we sat there, musing about what to expect on the walk, a young woman in a fur coat sat beside us. We were also sharing the table with a middle-aged, bearded, scruffy man. The lady in the coat, which looked freshly plucked from the back of an artic wolf, expressed such disgust at the man that it would have hurt deeply, had he not been drunk enough to be oblivious to her.

We’d have to average 15 miles a day, Dave told me, peering into the Coast to Coast book, but some days would be long and some short. Starting in the west meant that we’d be hitting the grand Lake District first, and it would be downhill from there in every way.

“You’re really selling it,” I told him.

“It might not be so pretty, but after the heights of the Lake District, it might be nice to be on flatter ground.”

“Especially with that pack you’ve got,” I told him. I’d been reminding Dave regularly how overpacked he was, but I knew that it was really only to disguise my own anxiety at being underpacked.

“When it’s on, it’s OK,” he said, looking down at the bulbous lump of possessions he had sat beside him. It’s quite a sensation to know that everything you have to live on, to live by, is in a bag next to you, and wherever to go next, you can leave nothing behind but that which you will leave forever. It’s a strange mix of freedom and constraint, to leave everything but the essentials. For someone who experiences his anxiety with the potency of a chili pepper, it leads to a severe amount of head-scratching – how and what to live on? I have a weakness when it comes to making decisions, when the infinite ramifications of the multiverse seem to appear before me like phantom futures.* But, sitting there next to Miss Posh and Mr Scruff, and my very own Dave, I was content. We felt like a couple of Dick Whittingtons in reverse, leaving the gold-paved streets of London to find a quainter, more idyllic world.

“Do you think we’ll be more or less wrecked than this guy?” I said referring to the drunk at the end of the table.

“About the same, I’m hoping,” Dave said. “But you’ll have to start drinking again.”

“No chance,” I said. “I’m taking the sober route to the gutter.”

*The tiny torch, for example, is a good space saver. But it has one of those special batteries that go in watches. If the battery runs out, can I replace it on the trail or will I end up buying a new torch? Then what do I do with the old torch? Just dump it somewhere? If not, I’ll be carrying around two torches; then I’m no better than Dave. Or... I could steal one of Dave’s “landing light” halogen bulbs, or rely on moonlight, or ensure I always position things in the tent in an organised, memorable way and proclude the need for a torch at all... Just recollecting this train of thought is turning me into a spinning top.

Take me to Part 6.

The Scourge Part IV

Previously on The Scourge... Link to Part 1

Part IV: Pepys Road, London.

Alfred Wainright, spiritual father of the Coast to Coast walk, wrote “I want to encourage in others the ambition to devise with the aid of maps their own cross-country marathons and not be merely followers of other people's routes: there is no end to the possibilities for originality and initiative.” With this in mind, we decided to merely follow Wainright’s route.

I had suggested walking east to west, following the sun, but Dave rightly pointed out that I was being an idiot. Going east, he said, laying out his case, means that you walk towards the sun in the morning, and have it on your back as the afternoon draws on. It also means that we can follow the book, Henry Steadman’s map-cum-guidebook Coast to Coast Path, to the letter. I realised I had developed a rather naïve sense of what trekking was to be like – just go forward in the direction you want. It hadn’t really occurred to me that trees, rivers, fences or cows might get in the way.

At Dave’s house, on the eve of the Big Walk, we took inventory and spread out our things. Dave’s backpack was roughly twice the size of mine, as was his tent. I had bought a one-man tent which was little bigger than a Smarties tube; Dave had a mansion.

“That’s heavy,” I said. “You’re going to regret it, mark my words.”

“When I’m stretched out diagonally in my tent – my Taj Mahal – enjoying a spacious and peaceful night’s rest, you’ll be the one who’s regretting it. I might put a small bar in the corner with a selection of scotches, so I can read my books with a pleasant tipple.”

The bar idea may have been a slight exaggeration, but Dave hadn’t scrimped. He really hadn’t. I examined his procurements which were now spread over the floor (a result of not being able to get them all in the bag): apart from the massive tent, a chunky sleeping bag and a yoga mat to sleep on, he had three books, a variety of wardrobe changes, two gas canisters, plenty of plates and cutlery, a flask, two mugs, a torch that one could use to beat an intruder of the night, an axe, an penknife, and four flat halogen lights.

“We’re not helping planes land,” I said, looking at the lights.

He paused. “I’ll leave one of the lights.”

The evening passed in this fashion – me telling Dave he had too much stuff and was going to regret it, and him finally accepting this argument and leaving something. I managed to convince him to leave the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but he wouldn’t budge on Rashomon by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, nor the Saga of Gunnlaugr Serpent-Tongue, a 13^th century Icelandic epic. These were, Dave insisted, vital for taking our minds, as well as our bodies, truly into the wilderness.

Each item was a battle, and we would never have gotten through it if we hadn’t had the aid of some decent single malt scotch. After this evening, I had told Dave, I wouldn’t drink for the entire journey. He eyed me with suspicion when I said this.

With our packs loaded, we went to bed. Dave, to the last night with his partner Cinthya; me, to the first night in a superlite sleeping bag, on a sofa. Superlite, I quickly realised, also meant superthin and supercold. If I am cold in this sleeping bag in a flat in London, then what about when... I pushed out the doubts. Tents are, like... insulated with body warmth, or something... I was sure it would be fine.

Take me to part 5.