Reading against the grain

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 24: Hooked me into reading

Honestly, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I loved books and reading long before I was able to read myself. My mother always read picture books aloud to me, and, after she was born, my sister and me. Usually she would read us four picture books per night, with each of us picking two, and although I can still name a lot of the old favourites, the first book, the first story that made me really care about stories, is lost in the mists of time. I couldn't tell you the first book I was able to read by myself either aloud or in my head — I imagine it was one of the rather boring books we borrowed from school to teach ourselves to read by practicing at home with our parents — and I don't even think I can remember the first book I really, really fell in love with.

I can remember the first book that made me realise I didn't have to interpret the narrative in the way an author intended. It was Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein, and I disliked the protagonist, wished she wasn't the point of view character, and instead became obsessed with one of the antagonists and imagined a whole secondary story going on around her, in which the book's protagonist was only a bit player. The idea that I could read a book in this way was like a lightbulb going off, and I suppose it was the first moment I understood transformative fandom, although of course, being a ten-year-old, I didn't name it as such!

( The other days )

I've only finished one book since I last updated this haphazard reading log of mine: Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw, the second in her series of books about Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead and other supernatural beings. It was, like the preceding book, great fun, packed with allusions to various pieces of gothic fiction, and poked gentle fun at so many portentous vampire clichés. I loved it.

Revoke, remain, resist

Yesterday, like (literally) millions of other UK citizens/residents, I went along to the anti-Brexit march in London. I've been going to protest marches since I was fifteen years old, and they've ranged from the tiny and scary (a rally against ongoing involvement in Iraq which ended up with several protesters hurling chairs and tables from a cafe along the march route into and out of the crowd) to gigantic (the huge anti-Iraq war march in Sydney when Australia was on the verge of sending troops in support of the US), and to warm, fuzzy, and little bit smug (when the EDL held an event in Cambridge and we turned out in droves to counterprotest), but I've never experienced anything like the march yesterday. I'd been on a similar anti-Brexit march around the same time two years ago, and it was huge, and it took time to get going, but eventually you were able to move at a normal pace, and you could get to the end of the route and hear the speeches.

This march was something else. I went with Matthias, and with a friend of ours, and we firstly decided to take an earlier train from Cambridge to London — it was already packed, mainly with protesters, but the one leaving an hour later was so full that people were being turned away — and secondly decided to walk from Kings Cross to the start of the march route, because the Tube was already overflowing. We got to the start of the route about half an hour early, and it was full to overflowing — in fact, I learnt later that the organisers had been advised to start half an hour early because the starting point was becoming dangerously overcrowded and couldn't accommodate the people who were still showing up. I am not kidding, but it took more than two hours for us to actually move from our start point, those at the head of the march had reached the end before we even left, and there were still thousands streaming in afterwards, and spilling into side streets. It took us three hours to walk what was really a half-hour walk, we never made it to the end point, and we missed all the speeches (not that I really needed to hear them, as I know what the speakers would have said). It was overwhelming. Estimates of numbers vary wildly — the most conservative estimate seems to be one million, and the highest two million. Meanwhile, the petition to revoke Article 50 has just hit five million signatures.

These numbers make me happy, but they don't make me optimistic. The anti-Brexit campaigners I follow on Twitter have been making wild predictions about what will happen next, based on numbers of petition signatures and feet on the ground at the march. I imagine they have to keep putting this sort of positive spin on things to keep hope alive and keep people fighting, but meanwhile there's talk of a leadership coup afoot in the Conservative Party and Michael Gove is being talked about as a credible prime ministerial candidate. And, as I say, I marched against the Iraq war, which achieved precisely nothing in getting the Australian government to change course, and we knew it wouldn't. People march for all kinds of reasons, and chief among mine is to register my dissent and be counted as a statistic, a pair of feet walking to show that I disagreed with a government decision, and, when history comes to judge us, be a part of the record that shows the government did not speak for me.

On a more nitpicky level, I am uneasy about the anti-Brexit movement pinning its hopes on a 'people's vote' (i.e. second referendum), and that the march was branded as such — although many, like me, were treating the march purely as an opportunity to register their opposition to Brexit and calling for Article 50 to be revoked. The actual People's Vote campaign is still full of those who lead the Remain campaign, including divisive figures like Tony Blair (who I heard on a podcast saying without a scrap of self-awareness that he felt it had been a mistake to keep him at arms' length during the referendum), and polling is less in favour of remaining the European Union than the People's Vote crowd like to imagine (basically, it depends on how you ask the question). What if we had a second referendum, and the answer was still to leave, and to leave with no deal? The first referendum was so painful and cruel to so many migrants, and its result was treated as license to unleash all manner of violent, abusive attacks on migrants and/or non-white people. The idea of a rerun is concerning.

In my ideal scenerio, we would simply revoke and never speak of this again (and go on to deal with the damage done by austerity on which many Leave voters had erroneously blamed EU membership), but that's unrealistic because it would be electoral suicide for both major parties and thus career suicide as well. My more realistic — but still overly optimistic — preference, therefore, would be to revoke Article 50, and undertake a series of consultative citizens' assemblies (with representative groups of voters and, crucially, experts from sectors that are going to be most affected by leaving the EU), and then come up with a way forward. Again, this is never going to happen, and I'll accept the 'people's vote' option if it comes to pass, but at this stage I think even that is too optimistic.

Going on the march felt good, and it was definitely the right thing to do, but I'm deeply worried about where we're heading next. We marchers are right, but it doesn't mean we'll be listened to.