This is another of my Hockney's, quite fitting for a Saturday morning, especially one like today when rain is predicted all weekend. But no matter, at some time today I will read a new book I have been sent by an old friend. It's called Songs of Somewhere Else by Gunmar Ekelof and I already like the title. And I hope he will not mind if I quote a few lines. This is from Jag skriver till dig - great title isn't it, it means, I write to you - and this is how it goes:
I write to you from a distant land
It has no colour
It has no images to give you
It doesn't give a thought to think
It is a distant land
How did you get there?
How does that line work, 'How did you get there, and not, how did you get here... it goes on:
It is a distant land
There is no nearness
If you come there you will find
simply a distant land...
I was thinking that should read, 'If you go there you will find...' and perhaps its a mistaken translation from the original Swedish, but then again not because in its entirety it makes perfect sense. Now if we understand this sense we will understand why it is right that football chairmen don't make anti-semitic comments, that shadow cabinet ministers dont embarrass all of us socialists with their patronising pictures of the working class. As a working class son of a coal miner and a school cleaner, I could easily have had Scottish flags draped from our council house windows, while a white van sat in the drive (which it often did when I was young). UKIP have shown their prejudices and rallying against them (as we surely should - I am with Dennis Skinner on this) is right and proper but it cannot come with such a blatant disregard and understanding of what actually constitutes multiculturalism. But Ekelof's lines say more than this to me, they say if we pick and chose at random, without reading the whole message we miss out on the meaning. This is what religious fundamentalists have being doing for years, Christians; Muslims; Jews and so on, the list of intolerance and misreading and misappropriaten in the name of religion is its biggest failure, and the question remains, 'How did you get there?' Now I was sent a link to this the other day, and goodness is it good. Call me a heretic and I know we are not supposed to mention it, but I never liked that Band Aid song; this I like, please go into iTunes etc and buy it - you know it makes sense even for the old fishing story. Give the people fish and they will eat well tonight, teach them how to fish and they will eat forever, this is Africans helping other Africans.
