Horrific disturbing visions of war

IN my teenage years, I was haunted. Not by spooks and spectres, you understand, but by vivid, terrifying nightmares of nuclear destruction.

For many years, I suffered a recurring dream which featured nuclear missiles tearing across blue skies, and which ended with a blast wave racing towards me, inexorably reducing everything in its path to blazing rubble and scorching the flesh of any person unlucky enough to be standing in its way. At this point I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding like a jackhammer and my pillow soaked in sweat.

There were two reasons for this omnipresent dread, the first being the political situation at that time, with the Soviet war in Afghanistan taking the Cold War to heights of tension not seen since the grim days of the Cuban missile crisis, which happened two years before I was born.

What was happening in Afghanistan was, at the age of 15, my first real exposure to such nerve-shredding brinksmanship, and not only was the TV news over the coming years full of this conflict, but there was also CND marches, the Aldermaston Women's Peace Camp and apocalyptic TV dramas like Threads, which graphically depicted the full horrors of a nuclear holocaust and left an indelible scar on the psyche of anyone who watched it.

Discharge's Cal in action.

All of this was already more than enough to unsettle anyone, but the second reason for my nightmares was the fact that I listened to Discharge.

For those who don't know them - which is probably most people - Discharge were a hardcore punk band from the Potteries and they were one of three bands that dominated my listening in the 1979-81 period, along with The Damned and Public Image Ltd.

Discharge released what I regard as two masterpieces - the Why? EP in 1981 and, a year later, the album Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, both of which focused (as did all their other records) on twin obsessions. Ten per cent of the time they took it upon themselves to attack 'the system', i.e. Government/authority/society in general, while the remaining 90 per cent of their existence was spent in a state of extreme nuclear paranoia.

In their song The Possibility of Life's Destruction, they liken a nuclear blast to "the sound of an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell". The same can be said for their music, really.

Here are a few typical Discharge lyrics: My head is filled with fear of war, fear and threat of war/Horrific disturbing visions of war fill my head (from Visions of War); Her loved one's just another piece of meat on the battlefields (from Why?); Men, women and children groaning in agony from the intolerable pain of their burns (from A Hell On Earth). You get the picture.

These words were delivered by spiky-haired vocalist Cal, who could never be described as a singer, because he did not sing. He simply unleashed vocal fury. It would not surprise me if his microphones had to be made of reinforced steel, in order to withstand the sheer blistering heat of his rage.

My wife is puzzled by my love of punk music and asks me how a gentle man can enjoy listening to stuff like Discharge. Who knows? Maybe, conversely, Jeffrey Dahmer liked to relax between murders by tuning in to a bit of Enya, or perhaps Peter Sutcliffe grooves around his prison cell with the dismal ditties of Dido stuck in his head, alongside all those other voices yelling "Kill! Kill!" to him.

Anyway, I did love Discharge - still do, in fact - but over the coming years, as they faded from the scene and the Cold War came to an unexpected but welcome end, my nuclear fears eventually subsided, and nowadays that particular nightmare hardly ever visits me.

Kim Jong-un.

However, Kim Jong-un may be about to change all that.

Those of you who take an interest in foreign affairs may have noticed that North Korea is up for a scrap. Kim Jong-un, who took over as the country's leader in 2011 following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, has taken exception to South Korea and the USA holding military drills in the Korean Peninsula, and for the past couple of weeks he has been bellowing bellicose threats to his country's enemies, like some pumped-up WWF contender trying to rile the heavyweight champion into giving him a shot at the belt.

Of course, the issuing of such warlike rhetoric is not exactly unfamiliar territory for North Korea, and there is often a huge disparity between what that country threatens to do and what it actually does.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to consider that in 2003, Tony Blair sent the UK's forces into Iraq on the basis that Saddam Hussein supposedly had weapons of mass destruction at his disposal (he didn't, as it turned out) and that his regime posed an immediate threat to peace (again, untrue). Fast forward ten years and Kim Jong-un and North Korea definitely have weapons of mass destruction and most certainly pose a clear and present danger to world peace, but somehow I can't see our boys marching into Pyongyang any time soon.

When we were kids, the first rule of playground fights was not to pick on anyone who had a big brother who could batter you. And North Korea has got a very big brother called China.

The rules of the game change depending on who the players are, it would seem.

And speaking of players, it gives me some degree of comfort to know that it's Barack Obama's finger on the nuclear button rather than Mitt Romney's right now. Can you imagine? I think that alone would have been enough to see those teenage dreams coming back to haunt me again on a near-permanent basis.

As yet, my nuclear nightmare has not returned, but the creeping tendrils of fear that prompted me to write this piece mean that the dream is doubtless lurking close to the surface, ready to strike in the dead of night and quicken my heart once more.

Night-night everyone, and sleep well. While we still can.

Farewell, old friends

SOMETIMES a news bulletin hits you from out of the blue and leaves you feeling profoundly upset.
Often it's when you hear about the death of someone famous whose life made a deep impression on you, as happened to me this week when I got a text from my brother Sean to tell me that the author James Herbert had died.
I first became acquainted with Herbert's work when, as a teenager, I read The Fog, a pulse-quickening tale about a yellow-tinged mist causing madness within those who come into contact with it, and the horror that ensues when the rules that bind society suddenly go out of the window.

James Herbert.

For me, this was a defining moment in the development of my tastes - the literary equivalent of the time I saw the Sex Pistols performing Pretty Vacant on Top of the Pops - and since then, I have hungrily devoured every James Herbert novel apart from his recently published final one, Ash, which I shall doubtless buy in the near future and read with a deep poignancy added to the usual thrills and scares.
But this sense of loss is not limited to people, and I had the same feeling just the next day when I heard the news that Didcot Power Station was closing down.
Until 2004, Didcot Power Station meant little to me, but in September of that year I drove down from my home town of Warrington for an interview for my present job in Southampton, the journey taking me along the A34 and past Didcot.
I have always been a fan of industrial landscapes. Perhaps that's down to where I grew up, in the shadow of Fiddlers Ferry Power Station, with Rylands wireworks and the Tetley Walker brewery on my doorstep, or maybe it's just something within me that sees beauty where others perceive an eyesore. If there was a gallery showing black and white images of grimy, smoke-belching factories, graffiti-strewn walls and overcast skies, I could happily while away many hours there. Dark, satanic mills? That's not how I see them. I'm sure that if I'd ever had to work in such an environment it would have altered my perspective, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, industrial landscapes give me a sense of familiarity, comfort and joy.

Didcot Power Station.

And so, as I have made many trips up and down the A34 over the past decade, on my way to and from visiting family and watching my beloved Warrington Wolves rugby league team, Didcot Power Station has been a landmark that I've always looked out for, a smile forming every time I have seen those six huge cooling towers on the horizon, dominating the Oxfordshire countryside around them and looming large over the Great Western Railway that runs beside them.
The clock began ticking for Didcot Power Station on January 1, 2008, when it opted out of the Large Combustion Plants Directive, a decision having been made not to install desulphurisation equipment which would have allowed it to continue operating. From that point, Didcot was given another 20,000 hours to run, and that time ran out on Friday, March 22, 2013. The switch was turned off, Didcot Power Station's life was over, and now only demolition lies in store for those 99m-high towers that I've watched out for so many times.
Somehow, tidings of Didcot's imminent demise had completely passed me by in 2008, so this week, when I heard the news that the power station was closing, I'd had no time to prepare for it and it hit me hard.
Pragmatists will say 'come on, it's only a building', but for me it goes deeper than that. Not just because the power station itself will be disappearing, but because of what it represents - change.
As I get older - I will be 49 this year - I am becoming ever-more averse to change, at the very point where change seems to be accelerating at a greater rate than ever. The more time you have to look back on, the more time you seem to spend looking back on it, and I can feel nostalgia for those times, buildings, people and ways of life that no longer exist, or have changed beyond recognition, becoming more deeply embedded within me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not walking around in a permanent state of depression about all of this, and I accept that change has always happened and always will. Sometimes, change can be a wonderful thing and can bring untold benefits. However, I must also accept that there's a bit of me always pulling towards the past, and yearning for days gone by. There's a part of my soul that's forever monochrome, and that's just the way it is.
So farewell James Herbert and Didcot Power Station and thanks for the memories.
I leave you with this. Apparently, Radio Oxford once ran a survey, asking for views on the worst buildings in Oxfordshire. Some listeners nominated Didcot Power Station, referring to it as looking like "somewhere up north". I can think of no finer tribute.