The spade with which I dig my allotment belonged to a friend of my wife’s grandmother. As a young man he would strap it on to the handlebar of his bicycle and pedal eight miles to his allotment each weekend. After digging all day, he’d lash it back on and cycle the eight miles home again for his tea. He did this every weekend for years – and always with the same spade across his handlebar.
The handle is pitted and cracked and loose around the join now; the blade is worn to half what it once was. But my wife’s grandmother remembers when it was new and shiny and insisted we take it. And if the handle eventually breaks and is replaced; if the blade is replaced too… it will still be the same spade in her eyes. There’s more English tradition soaked through that bit of wood and metal than you’ll ever find in a textbook. And one day, even if our grandchildren don’t end up using it to turn the soil on our particular allotment, wherever they are digging, they’ll be digging with that spade – countless new heads and new handles notwithstanding.
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This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
Defining the age through a slogan a day
This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
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