London Street Games

"Norman Douglas cottoned onto the fact that children’s games were a source of oral literature that lay outside of other kinds, and had not been studied before. In this strange book, he went out on the streets in the early 1900s, watched cockney kids playing and wrote it all down. It’s an exceptionally good bit of social anthropology. It’s all there. And rather like the Frank Harris book with sex, it’s a very direct window into cockney culture at that time, unmediated by the requirement to fulfil the expectations of bourgeois culture. That makes it invaluable for getting a feeling of what a working class child’s life might be like at that time. They’re all pretty weird. And they’re open to all sorts of interpretation. It does. I know that a lot of people – including many modernists – are not particularly interested in the vernacular, and think of it as a distraction. But I think it’s impossible to get close to things without it. In The Book of Dave , I bowdlerise English to get a kind of future speak, because language changes. I regard myself as a more faithful naturalist than much of naturalistic fiction. I’ve been a constistently outspoken critic of the whole thing. I object to my tax money being wasted on it, and I object to performance sport in general. I think it’s horseshit. Why don’t you just go run in a field, with sheep? It’s meaningless that some guy on a bicycle gets given 20 million quid. And the way the Olympics exist in a grotesque linkage or synergy with the international finance capital is so obvious. Both are arenas that exalt an essentially functionless and useless human performance of winning and losing, and use that as the tail that wags the dog. That’s why the Olympics feed so enormously into the collective psyche. Exactly. The anology continues. HSBC has its doping scandal, as athletics has its own. The two of them are mirror images. No one should be shocked that there is corruption in the Olympics – that tickets are sold through foreign agents, that athletes are taking drugs and have huge financial contracts, that sponsors refuse to let people wear T-shirts with other corporate logos on them, that Macdonald’s makes you fat, that the infrastructure built in Stratford is useless to anybody, and that the Olympic legacy will not be fulfilled. Schadenfreude is an unpleasant attribute, but if I were prone to it I could tell you that in a month or two’s time, the cost will come home big time, and people will start getting pissed off. The government couldn’t raise the money for the Olympics through the private sector, so the taxpayer had to put the money up for it – was forced to do so, undemocratically. And we will have nothing to show for it. Just read a lot of books. I certainly did, and still do. Do anything, really. Anything which brings you into contact with the world. The big crisis for literature today is creative writing [teaching], which is ludicrous at every level. It’s like these cunts like Cameron, who have never done anything but be a politician. And there isn’t a market for these creative writing graduates’ in most cases mediocre lucubrations. You are educating people to be writers who can’t make a living, who will go on to teach more writers who can’t make a living. So just read books, and write, and live."