Sandy Hook

by a3_nm on Wikipedia

When we first moved to the US, and I started blogging, I thought I would write about guns. I never did. I didn't want to talk about them. Not when I found bullets stacked like candy at a checkout; not when my kids came home from a play date talking about how their friend had showed them all his rifles; not even when the father of one of our friends was murdered whilst out jogging. Not after Fort Hood, or Tucson, or Aurora. I still don't want to write about guns now.

I took my kids to school yesterday morning, as usual with no other choice than to expect that they would still be alive when I came to collect them. My kids were calm and happy and so, it seemed, were all the other children. The parents and teachers, however, were not. I saw in their glassy, tired eyes what I felt in my stomach: a layer of grim resolve that had crusted over the mess of sickening horror and helplessness. We easily exchanged fake smiles and happy greetings, like toy money for wooden food. The other parents and I were all in the same boat, trying to carry on normally, not to show how scared we were. God knows how the teachers were coping, how they had got through the weekend. I wanted nothing more than to hug every one of them, but of course we were putting on a show of strength, denying our vulnerabilities for the sake of the children.

I'm sure a lot of children are upset, and I don't think that is a bad thing. Mine - and seemingly most kids at our school - are not and this isn't a bad thing either. They were fine all day, apparently. Fine whilst they wrote letters of condolence to an elementary school so like their own; fine whilst they conducted drills, working out how twenty-five kids could hide in a classroom should a man with an assault rifle ever prowl the hallways - all overseen, presumably, by wonderful teachers whose voices didn't crack, whose hands didn't shake.

These women are now front-line protection for our children, because we didn't want to talk about guns.

Although expressly designed to injure and kill, guns would still be awful even if one had never been fired at a human being. Guns are cheating. The destructive power of a speeding bullet has not been earned by the person pulling the trigger; they have not flexed superior muscles, demonstrated greater cleverness or exercised better judgement. Nobody needs such an unnatural advantage, unless they are living in the wilds and plagued by wolves or bears.

If you live in a city, you don't need a gun. They should be banned. It is not impossible - this is, after all, a country that made alcohol illegal if you can believe it, and if you can ban that, you can ban anything. Nobody needs a semi-automatic assault rifle. Walmart doesn't need to sell them. Arms manufacturers can make plenty of money hawking their wares to the armed forces of the world. It can be done, if only those people who are obstacles would stop thinking of themselves as victims, put the guns down and step away.

Neil Armstrong

I don't tend to get too sad or reflective when old people die - it's not as if it should come as a surprise. But some people are so important, or represent something so fundamental, that it would be wrong not to give some serious thought to their passing.

This isn't that serious thought, that'll come later, slowly. But shooting from the hip, I'm slightly overawed by what the name of Neil Armstrong means to me. The Moon landings are, suddenly, a long time ago now and it is becoming hard not to think of them as the zenith for our civilisation: an achievement that has not been and, worryingly, might not be surpassed.

We shouldn't ever be blasé about the fact that, in the late 1960s, we fired men into space to leave their footprints on the dusty surface of another world before bringing them back safely to Earth.

It wasn't just Neil Armstrong's achievement, of course. Hundreds of thousands of men and women worked directly on the project, or contributed towards it. Millions more worked to fund it. And the rest of the world watched on their TVs and held their breath in hope and wonder.

But alone out of all those involved and all those astronauts who came after, Neil Armstrong took those first steps and thus, despite his death today, his name will be remembered. Thousands, tens of thousands of years into the future, possibly for as long as our species survives, he will be remembered.

It's very rare, but some people do achieve such immortality. The real events become contested or forgotten, but we hold onto their names and retell their stories, forever. And having been at the centre of the most extraordinary story, Neil Armstrong has passed from our mortal world and become the stuff of legend.
 

The Bridges of San Francisco

(Not the Bay Bridge, the other one.)

I love this city, but I don't think I could live here for very long.

I realised this yesterday as we were driving across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. It's a long road bridge that stretches across the Bay in two decks: the upper, open to the sky and with views of the water, is for traffic heading into the city; the lower, leading to California proper, is a claustrophobic corridor of covered steel. Even on a Sunday, with only moderate traffic, getting across the bridge took too long and I started feeling anxious. On a week day, at rush hour, say, with the cars at standstill, I know I would find it extremely difficult to cope.

Because of earthquakes, of course. There will be one, at some point. In Houston our natural disaster of choice is the hurricane - dreadful, destructive, life-wrecking things, but we get a fair bit of warning and one can get out of the way. Earthquakes don't give sufficient notice. As a visitor, for a few days, this doesn't worry me. I think I could stay quite a long while, in fact, and I would carry on feeling fine. Until I found myself on one of the bridges, moving slowly, and, suddenly, I would be horribly aware that one could happen in an instant and there would be almost no chance of survival.

The murders that were committed in Aurora, CO, took place while we were getting ready to fly to California; we weren't properly aware what had happened for a long while after we had landed. You know all about the anger, horror and other strangled, desperate feelings such a crime stirs in one's hearts and guts - but something else struck me once we had finally got back into San Francisco after our trip across the Bay.

They made me feel the same way that the bridge did: suddenly vulnerable to a threat I had discounted as vanishingly unlikely. Murders like this happen from time to time in America, just as the earthquakes do in San Francisco. Unlike these natural disasters, I know they could be prevented - but I also know this country is never going to take the steps that are necessary to do so. Just as the bridges have made me nervous about beautiful San Francisco, these killings have made me despair for America. I'm not sure I want to raise my kids here, lest they get entangled with the madness of the place.

In a few days, I'll leave California and I'll forget about earthquakes.

The sun shines. The waves in the glitter in the Bay. It's beautiful to visit.

The Shock of Death

On the 15th of April 1984 I watched Tommy Cooper die on live television. The sixty-three year old comic, whose health had been deteriorating after decades of heavy drinking, suffered a heart attack and collapsed on stage in the middle of a performance. The audience, already splitting their sides, were sent into hysterics at what they supposed to be a prat-fall, so that his last seconds of life were carried away on a roaring wave of laughter.

At the time I thought that was a fantastic and appropriate send off for a such a beloved comic, although the truth, of course, is more ragged and less satisfying. In the darkness, behind the curtain, frantic efforts were made by friends and crew to revive him whilst, on stage, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee were forced to try and carry on the show until the next ad break. The incident was covered on the evening news but, although pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, confirmation of his death wasn't released until the next morning.

It's still the only death I have ever seen. I'm not acquainted with the shock of death, barely cognisant of grief at all. The people I've known who have died have all been elderly and ill. I've held tight to the certainty that it has been right and good that they have died, and to the hope that medical science has been able to make their passing as comfortable as possible.

Elisabeth Sladen died yesterday. I saw the news on Twitter and instantly rejected it. Some fool had got it wrong and would be utterly humiliated for saying it out loud. I unfollowed, disgusted. But then it came up again, from a more reputable account. Still I refused to accept it, remembering what had happened with Gabrielle Giffords: pronounced shot dead online and now walking and talking in a Houston hospital. I checked the BBC, who had nothing. Googled her. Still no corroboration. I spent thirty minutes hitting refresh on five different websites, willing the incomprehensible news to be untrue. But gradually reality hardened, hypothesis solidified into irrevocable certainty.

I'm sure some of you won't know it, but Lis Sladen was an actor. I never met her, but she had been marvelling me, making me laugh and, above all, scaring me my entire waking life. She played the character Sarah Jane Smith in the television show Doctor Who, originally from 1974 to 76 and then returning frequently thereafter, until she got her own spin-off show in 2007. To say that she was universally loved and admired would be an understatement. The press have resorted to the cliché that she was 'the best Dr Who girl', but it's such a belittling description of her contribution to the show. Sarah Jane was never a screaming bimbo. In an age of bubble-wrap aliens and cardboard sets she sold the reality of the drama. More than any other actor, Sladen was always utterly convincing; threats that should have been laughable became terrifying. At a time when being a Doctor Who fan meant ridicule, she earned the eternal gratitude and devotion of a generation by taking it seriously.

The awful shock is that nobody knew she was ill. Her new show, The Sarah Jane Adventures, is still in production, part way through the fifth season. Coincidentally, like Cooper, she was also sixty-three, but you don't need me to tell you that it is not the age it was in 1984. Her character had always possessed an indomitable youthfulness that hadn't diminished as she got older and it seemed impossible that she wouldn't go on making TV for years yet.

By all accounts Lis Sladen was a delightful person, very private, modest, with a wicked Scouse sense of humour and a profound yet unpretentious dedication to her acting. Left only with what she achieved on screen I can only say that I am utterly bereft that she has gone. Her death comes just as fans around the world were excitedly awaiting the new series of Doctor Who on Saturday. Just like the Doctor himself, the show continues, endlessly regenerating whilst its mere human contributors grow old and die. It is a miserable loss.

For nearly forty years Sarah Jane has been a powerful and positive female character for what was primarily an audience of young boys. How wonderful that my own sons have been able to watch her in action, that they should get to watch such brilliant television - an adventure series where the alien-fighting hero is a single mother in her sixties. Not for nothing is Doctor Who the best television in the world and a great deal of that is because of Elisabeth Sladen.