Kicking, Smashing, Jostling
Even family parties seemed to be hoping for something sensational to look at
Happy Friday!
And a warm welcome from a typical boil-in-the-bag English summer’s day. Hot, but not holiday hot, if you know what I mean?
For those of you following the story of my dramatic car key recovery, Terry turned out to be a proper geezer who used to work in Smithfield meat market.
Despite being a proper geezer, Terry has a long history in Bournemouth.
As a young man in the 1960s, Terry was a Mod and has fond memories with his pals riding scooters down from London to Bournemouth, Quadrophenia-style, to fight the Rockers on the beach.
In May 1964, eight people were sent to prison or reform school and another twenty-seven fined for their part in the kicking of bins, smashing of windows and jostling of bystanders.
This was the view of the prosecutor:
There is no doubt whatever … that large numbers of the public were upset, frightened and indeed, in some instances of very elderly ladies, terrorised by the behaviour of these defendants.
The local paper hinted at milder entertainment:
A big obstacle to the police was the number of ordinary people who collected in the Square, near the Pier and at other trouble spots, apparently intent on seeing everything they could. Even family parties seemed to be hoping for something sensational to look at.
And, indeed, the summer clashes between Mods and Rockers were, by and large, a news media spectacle put on by the press.
In his famous analysis of the events, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, sociologist and criminologist Stanley Cohen showed how the media’s exaggeration and simplification of the clashes actually helped to define and then spread the behaviour as a model for others, fuelling the very behaviour those righteous newsmen supposedly abhorred.
But there’s worse,
As Simon Kuper explained in this powerful and touching profile of Stanley Cohen’s work, moral panics are used to ‘hand more power and bigger budgets to the forces of control’.
In this case, Mods and Rockers gave the authorities ‘an alibi for a crackdown’:
Police flooded seaside towns; police and courts suspended civil liberties, for instance by barring youths on scooters from entering beach resorts, confiscating their belts to humiliate them, or keeping them locked up too long without trial; police informers infiltrated young people’s clubs and coffee bars; and parliament passed a punitive Malicious Damage Act.
Ahh, the good old days — eh, Terry? 😉
But while Cohen’s study was historically specific — be warned! — his conclusions are universal.
The exact demographic characteristics of today’s ‘folk devils’ will shift with the changing political agenda, but they are always groups that are ‘highly visible and structurally weak’ and they are always used as a convenient alibi.
As Simon Kuper puts it:
Twenty years ago, the folk devil of the feckless single mother pumping out children in order to get state benefits was a brilliant excuse for the UK’s government to cut welfare. Later a new folk devil, the ‘bogus asylum seeker’ exploiting ‘Soft Touch Britain’, fulfilled the same role.
And while the media — and we, its consumers — fly into frothy outrage over today’s moral panic (from a brief dip into BBC News: knives, grooming and sharks) we are all missing the bigger picture.
Have you ever witnessed a nation sucked into a moral panic over climate change?
Studying moral panics, [Stanley Cohen] wrote, helps us see ‘the ways we are manipulated into taking some things too seriously and other things not seriously enough.’
Amen.
For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor, cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel and now the British Exploring Society Expeditions Manager. Thank you for all your well-wishings 🙏
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I manage expeditions.
Delete The Internet [UPGRADE 🚀]
I still don’t have a browser on my phone. Nothing bad continues to happen.
Confession: this isn’t quite true. Last week, I installed a lightweight browser so that I can do things like pick up a Dunelm click and collect delivery.
This browser, Firefox Focus, doesn’t have my bookmarks, history or passwords saved. I don’t use it for anything except mindcrushingly dull admin.
According to the brilliant ActionDash, last week I used Firefox Focus for precisely 1 minute. Psychologically and behaviourally it’s exactly as if I had no browser. Triumph.
Whatsapp on the other hand…
Last week I used Whatsapp for 5 hours and 3 minutes. This, to me, isn’t horrifying. I semi-often use Whatsapp to call people and calling people is nice!
No, what’s horrifying is that last week I opened Whatsapp no fewer than 441 times. This is a very typical weekly open rate for me and it works out at an average of 63 opens a day or once every fifteen waking minutes. Yikes.
So, yeah. I’m deleting Whatsapp on my phone next. Just as with the browser, I’ll still (hopefully) have access on my laptop.
Deleting Whatsapp is a little more complicated than deleting my browser, assuming I want to backup 3.9GB of chat history 😲 Reinstalling, which I will at some point have to do for expedition work, is also mildly more complicated.
But I’ve done it before and there’s no reason why I can’t do it again.
So…
Here we go…
What’s stopping me?
…
And, just like that — it’s gone.
(It’s actually been gone since Wednesday, when I wrote this.)
Thank you for sharing your own stories of disconnection — I love ‘em! My inbox (or the comments section) is always open for your nuggets of inspiration. 🤗
Two Days Later…
After deleting Whatsapp, I drove to Dartmoor, cramming in a couple more Quality Days before my Hill & Moorland Leader assessment in September.
Don’t tell the assessor, but I rarely have much of a plan when I go to Dartmoor. I usually pick a spot on the map and figure it out from there.
This isn’t always great preparation, especially not if I’m hoping for a good night’s camping.
Finding a wild campsite on Dartmoor means juggling the Dartmoor National Park Authority camping map with my mental map of free car parks — and hoping I find something decent.
This time I got lucky.
The car park at Venford Reservoir is free and the nearest legal wild camping is only a half hour walk up hill (mind the cattle).
But never mind convenience: it’s beautiful.
Our ancestors clearly thought so too. Strung across the hilltop, like the Three Sisters of Orion’s Belt, are three ring cairns of indeterminate antiquity, looking out over the sunrise.
I could’ve given certain people a bit more warning (sorry! 😘), but two days on Dartmoor without Whatsapp was… fine.
Deleting Whatsapp was definitely a bigger deal for my brain than deleting my browser. I must have pulled out my phone about a thousand times, with a compulsion to share a thought or a photo and wondering vaguely who might have messaged.
But last night, sheltered from the wind by the cairns, I slept until 9am. And surely that counts for something.
Happy Birthday, Us 🎂
On Wednesday, The David Charles Newsletter (Working Title) celebrated turning
TEN
FREAKIN’
YEARS
OLD
That is a ridiculously long time to be doing anything so consistently and would probably have long since become unsustainable if it wasn’t for the eyeballs and intrigue of you lovely people.
All 746 of you — cheers! 🍻
For the first 18 months of its life, TDCN (WT) was a monthly affair and, as I dive into full-time expedition lyfe, I can’t rule out the possibility that we might return to those days at some point.
But writing you stories brings me immense satisfaction and, every now and then, untrammelled joy. (You’d hope so, given I’ve now served up 409 of the darlings 😍)
So here’s to the next decade!
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Meet Joy France, The Oldest Female Battle Rapper
After 64-years of living life quietly, retired school teacher Joy France is on a mission to be heard. After finding her voice in the form of spoken-word poetry, Joy attempts to take her new found passion to another level.
Can she break gender and age stereotypes by competing in the brutal, youthful, male-dominated world of battle rap? Or is she too notoriously O.L.D?
via
🍄2. A Guide to Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys
Essential reading from Vulture.
3. ‘The Warplanes Must Be Silent’
Poem by Marwan Makhoul, poet and managing director of a construction company:
My style is not always what the audience wants. Sometimes, the best way to be heard is through being gentle and calm.
Further Reading: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall
This is the book I’ve been waiting for — a portrait of daily life in Israel and Palestine, a story that reads like a novel, but so isn’t.
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a lorry in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site.
It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian.
This book won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for good reason.
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
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As always, thank you for your eyeballs and thanks for your support.
Big love,
dc:
