London Stockholm Lockdown
The Stockholm Syndrome was first described in 1973. Hostages from a bank raid in, you guessed it, Stockholm refused or felt unable to testify against the criminals. The enforced close proximity, one might even say intimacy, had somewhat blurred distinctions between captive and captor and now they were all working on sharing similar worldviews and maybe, once parole was on offer, forming a band together.
In spite of story expectations, all the main participants faded from public life. However, it is rumoured that the members of the jury went on to dominate Swedish society. One fronted an Abba tribute act, one helped finance the formation of IKEA and its self-build cages and relationship-straining chests of drawers and torture chambers. A third is responsible for Volvo insisting that car headlights be kept on all day every day. We're in this together, folks. Stay safe.
*
You know there's a truly global crisis on when the conspiracy theories expand exponentially. I haven't seen so much fabulism colonising the internet since 9/11. Drink silver on a Tuesday from a flask made of racoon skin and you will rid yourself of this virus that has been transmitted via 5G waves invented by Bill Gates and really isn't anything more than your standard seasonal flu being used by governments and big business to deliberately destroy the world economy upon which their power base is built.
I stayed home and lockdown proved to be a time to reacquaint myself with comfortable old songs whose choruses I could sing along with. Slow or mid-paced in the main; nothing tricky, nothing cluttered. Favourite old films and TV shows on DVD or the i-player. As if Brexit had actually taken me back to an earlier version of Britain.
Then I'm lying in bed during nocturnal lockdown and I can still hear a heap of traffic trundling around the North Circular and I'm bound to question whether they can all be emergency vehicles ferrying patients to wards or delivery lorries heading towards…? Suddenly I start believing that an errant part of my brain is misbehaving in my solipsistic universe and life is going on as normal behind the complicated smokescreen of news outlets, social media, behaviour of friends, family, employer… everyone is acting out a part for my benefit - more like imprisonment - and it's all just show, I'm being monitored and entrapped for spurious and highly focused reasons…
The police chopper hovers low overhead, its lights patterning the otherwise plain curtain and its rhythm is more window-shaking than the neighbours' recent musical barbecue. I pull the duvet tighter, retreat like a snail into its shell.
*
Patty Hearst was put forward as a perfect exemplar of Stockholm Syndrome. Young, blonde and rich - granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, old Citizen Kane himself - she was kidnapped in February 1974 by some two-bit revolutionaries and within a couple of months was fighting for their cause. Apparently. As tabloid titillation, this tale had it going. Guns, a good girl gone bad, a touch of Bonnie and Clyde and other outlaw stories, a socialite turned socialist and a distraction from - not to say reaction to - Nixon's Watergate America.
Later analysis and belatedly accepted evidence paint a different picture: one of rape, coercion, brainwashing sessions and compliance at gunpoint. Every story is more complex than its surface.
*
Have I unknowingly been inculcated with "the Fear"? I advised another writer not to use real people in his story. But when defining Slipstream, Bruce Sterling classified every aspect of life as "stuff" - i.e. material ripe for employment in speculative fiction. And our forebears in New Wave SF - Ballard, Moorcock, et al - were never shy of referencing living people.
All life post - what? 25? 29? - is a vain attempt to rediscover the fire and daring we had back when reputation, mortgages, DBS checks and the like were simply Fibonacci smoke curls.
There is no such thing as real people. Just because the physical face coverings and respirators are easily visible to all doesn't hide the truth of the social masks still being worn underneath.
*
The London to Stockholm Grand Charity Challenge was initiated in 2021 as a response to the need for ever greater endeavour when fundraising for good causes. Centenarians with Zimmer frames completing marathons, the out-tattoo you celebrity binge on Red Nose Day, the self-immolation dance videos on TikTok… it was no longer enough to shake a small bucket at passing pedestrians.
Participants were strapped into a cylindrical contraption described as a beer keg in England and as a herring barrel in Sweden. Not exactly equivalent to either, there was one Perspex porthole: for vision and aeration. For the first mile, these kegs were rolled along the police-cordoned A20 by sweaty volunteers. Several barrels ran askew and were ultimately disqualified from competition.
Strapped onto a small fleet of flatbed trucks, the kegs were next transported to a fishing vessel moored in the port of Felixstowe. At the edge of British territorial waters, they were unceremoniously tipped overboard to make their own way in a north-easterly direction to the nearest Scandinavian coastline, the thinking being that the remnants of the Gulf Stream would power their progress.
With heads and occasional arms and other appendages such as wine bottles poking through the open portholes, the marine craft resembled, depending upon your imaginative turn of mind, either a flotilla of giant corks or a fleet of miniaturised Steampunk submarines. Perhaps also an outbreak of giant sea snails. The brave souls within had been reminded to bring food and drink with them for a voyage anticipated to take three days but no arrangements had been made regarding toilet facilities. By day two, increasingly battered by the petulant North Sea, the selfless saps were floating in a microcosm of their own effluent.
A couple of drone-cams tracked shadowed the sad armada. Interest in their charitable endeavour might have been sustained had their number included a ripped ex-footballer or a bikini clad social media influencer but the contingent comprised of middle-aged suburban and new town types doing it to raise money for children's cancer. And other good causes.
The next world crisis hit big and hit suddenly before even one of these good souls made landfall. We needed a big global fundraiser instead. Faded lothario Gobshite Williams offered to perform a cutting-edge gender reassignment on his own Botox-ed body live on TV if the viewing public would stump up their millions in advance. Of course they would. Channel 4 ditched the dirty sailors and licked their lips at a new watermark for terrestrial television, a stunning mix of sex, surgery and pop stardom. They billed the broadcast as "Auto da Fey".
*
Did you ever meet anybody who claimed to have lived previous lives? Ever notice something about them and their story?
What about the legions of fans of large-scale, multi-book or TV and film franchise fantasy?
Here's your last clue and I'll do a little reveal, too. Steampunk. Always airship captains; never kids from the Victorian workhouse or carcinogen-infused coal miners.
So, fifty centuries ago I was a high priest in Ancient Egypt. Then I was reborn as Merlin or King Arthur or Guinevere or Lady Jocasta of the Fair Dark Fells. Never a short-lived bonded serf doomed to die beneath the cart or the plough or a boy soldier stabbed in the guts in Gaul or a shivering virgin sacrificed to the gods of love.
All societies are unequal, it's just a matter of degree. But we love our Pharaoh, our king, our country, our, ahem, liberty. Dreams of who we could have been keep us happily following our lords and masters.
*
Kurt Vonnegut is perhaps most famous these days for his "Eight Rules of Writing". But he also accomplished many other interesting things. In his semi-autobiographical novel "Timequake", perhaps realising his own mortality, he throws in a whole load of story ideas that he was not going to fully develop. Just the bare bones, that was all.
I've no intention of popping my clogs anytime soon and in my case it's probably sheer laziness but I know that I have some story set-ups that I am never going to bother turning into proper tales. Just being open and honest with you. You'd want that from me, wouldn't you?
*
The City of Little Angels was founded in 1886 but in a timestream slightly removed from our own. This was a mostly peaceful place of co-existence. The City Fathers put this down to their managed strategy of allowing the young angels full flight throughout their troublesome teenage years, which would be truncated by a deep and meaningful inculcation into adulthood ceremony at which their wings would be forcibly clipped and rendered ineffective. There would be a period of supervised adjustment before taking on full grown-up responsibilities in a responsible fashion. The next forty, fifty or more years would be spent looking back wistfully towards a golden age of youth and freedom. As this mindset is the default for most societies, everything seemed satisfactory.
Of course, there was some rebellion. The story would fashion itself as an intergenerational conflict. We'd choose our heroes, our side to root for and go through the drama with them.
But there was an added complication. The angels were a minority species in the city which was dominated by standard homo sapiens. The revelation would be reached that instead of this being teenage tearaways fighting father figures, the whole plot could carry an allegory about racism. The Feather Fathers weren't doing it for the good of the angels per se; rather they were colluding with their human overlords to allow a little youthful dissent here and there but ultimately to let their culture be subsumed by the dominant hierarchy.
*
As the period of enforced confinement continued, I found myself mellowing towards those who had placed me under house arrest. Indeed, I relished their daily updates broadcast direct into my bedsitter. Whereas they had once seemed an interchangeable array of Politburo marionettes spouting a well-worn mantra, the unavoidable and regular exposure to their dogma gave me time to discern levels of individuality. Second in command and charged with keeping everyone in time, Dominic Land-Grab remained somewhat innocuous. But the glorious leader of the Eton Fops, blue-eyed soul singer Jojo Johnson, compelled with his expansive jazz hand gestures; and even his tendency to forget the lyrics didn't matter because he was sticking to standards we could all sing along with. White-faced Professor Whitby on bass cut a suitably Gothic figure tucked away stage right. My attention was mostly drawn, however, to lead guitarist and backing vocalist Max Handicraft. In his sharp blue early Beatles slim cut suit, he possessed the sincerity of an estate agent. When he crooned, "I'll always be there for you, Mama" and "The PPE is on its way", I found myself filled with unquestioning faith in his ability.
It was Stockholm Syndrome alive and well in the living rooms of London.
*
From the mid-1970s onwards, I became obsessed with Patty Hearst. Here's my schedule:
1974 - Patty Hearst
1975 - Patty Hearst
1976 - Patty Hearst
1977 - Patty Hearst
1978 - Kate Bush
*
I've learnt so much from George Orwell. He fought in the Spanish Civil War; I've been on holiday to Murcia and Ibiza. I doubt that he ever went to Stockholm and I hold the same doubts over myself.
Spoiler alert. At the end of Orwell's novel "1984", hero Winston Smith has been brainwashed and re-educated so that he now loves his oppressor, the state as represented by Big Brother.
All societies function on a form of the Stockholm Syndrome. We wouldn't want it any other way.
