www.bobsmithart.com

 

If my poor pun needs an

exclamation mark, please

add it yourself

 

Katie Grant

 

I
I didn't go on strike yesterday to defend public sector pensions from what they like to call 'the great pensions robbery!' (their exclamation mark) though I think, even from my short time in public service, I have such a pension myself. I've never been much good at either thing: striking or pensions.
     Some deep-rooted aversion prevents me 'withdrawing my labour', perhaps because my ancestral family never did much labouring in the first place, so I feel a need to rectify their shortfall. As for pensions, they seem a form of bureaucratic magic: nice, but essentially imaginary. I'm simply unable to believe that on some future birthday, money will arrive or that I won't be dead before it reaches me. These are explanations, not excuses. And actually, I don't feel an excuse is needed.
     Public sector workers get a pretty good deal – often rather better than their private sector colleagues – and the disruption caused to patients, travellers and other workers was grossly disproportionate, with deleterious longterm effects. Yes, yes, everything is absolutely unfair. Bankers' bonuses, Freddy Shreddy, hedge-fund managers, all those Something for Nothingers, indeed Everybody Else. It's a rotten world. There shouldn't be a strike: there should be a revolution, and a contemporary Wordsworth will even now be penning radical poetry, shaming everybody who went plodding to desk or factory floor as betrayers of the common man. But perhaps what swung me irreversibly against striking was that exclamation mark after 'robbery'. What was its purpose? Where was the joke? Could the phrase not speak for itself? If exclamation marks were taxed, a single day would suffice to fill Treasury coffers and end the economic crisis. Then nobody would need to strike. It's an idea.
    

II
Exclamation marks rule on Facebook, where they are splattered like sheep droppings in a field – never singly. Their use is silly and idle – much like the greater part of social networking itself. Sometimes social networking is downright horrid – the trolls, for example, who grubble about invading the Facebook pages of the dead, the bereaved or the desperate in order to spray poison (liberally dosed, naturally, with cowardly exclamation marks screeching 'can't you take a joke, stchoopid!'). But ordinary folk are equally hypnotised by Facebook's easy charms.
     When you log on and are immediately asked 'What's on your mind?' it's like somebody saying 'how are you?' and apparently wanting a proper answer. The trouble is that what's on people's minds is usually either bland or bilious, so genuine gems or useful referrals struggle like tiny chinks of sunlight through a heavy and relentless waterfall of clichéd verbal garbage (geddit!). Social networking is a kind of muckspreader, but with negative rather than positive fertiliser.
     It's human nature, I suppose, that the same people who do a bit of online muck or rubbish spreading every morning through Twitter or Facebook, are up in arms about the muck-spreading of the popular press. I'm not equating illegal phone hacking with legal online dung dissemination, but before we get too morally snooty let's not pretend it's a matter of angels (us) and demons (them). The human soul is a grey mishmash of angelic devilry, and we all have a soul, or so churchmen would have us believe, although probably these days with exclamation marks slotted in – hey! we all have souls! – so that if necessary, they can claim it was only a joke! (See what I did there? What larks!)

III
On this, the first day of Advent, a friend, whose political views and my own diverge so sharply we almost meet round the other side, has sent me a lovely e-Advent calendar. It's a snowglobe opening into a cityscape of nostalgic prettiness. Every day of Advent, you click on an object and bingo, with delectable twee-ness, it springs to Christmassy life. This year, the scene is London (cue for cyber-Nat hatemail), but although St Paul's features, there's not an Occupy tent in sight. I'd like to think this was because, in the imagination of the calendar's creator, the Occupy bods had been braver than they were and actually gone into St Paul's claiming 'sanctuary' from the evils of capitalism, much as in medieval times fugitives claimed sanctuary from persecution. Imagine the flap amongst the cassocks!
     Sanctuary may have been abolished by James 1st in 1623 – oh Lord, I've fallen into a nat-trap, let me start again: sanctuary may have been abolished by James VI and 1 in 1623, but using that as an excuse for physical eviction might have sounded a bit lame, and the pictures of armed, fluorescent police dragging mothers and babes onto a rainy street under the caption 'St Paul's is no sanctuary' would have been classics of their kind. If I'd been amongst protesters, I'd not only have invaded St Paul's itself, I'd also have found a Jesus lookalike (not hard, surely, since tents, beards and sad eyes always go together) and organised hourly biblical recitations. 'Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble' (Psalm 41). 'For I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise' (Psalm 42). 'What must I do to inherit eternal life? … ‘Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor' (Luke 18:22).
     Of course, it being December 1st, I've only pinged one object in my snowglobe so far. Anything might happen in the next 23 days. If I carry on reading the Bible, I might discover that I am, after all, a striking revolutionary. If you feel this rather poor pun needs an exclamation mark, would you mind awfully adding it yourself?

 

Katie Grant is an author, a freelance journalist, a part-time lecturer
and a broadcaster