So First of May is come and gone. I don’t know how it works where you are, but over here Arbejdernes Kampdag or ‘Workers Battle Day’ is something of a big deal, with marches, rallies and crucially, much public drinking. In Copenhagen the main event takes place after everyone has marched to Fælledparken, a huge open park close to where I live. All the left-leaning parties, factions and offshoots are there, some admittedly leaning at decidedly less acute angles toward the left than others, and each having their respective encampment. These latter range in sophistication from simple booths, such as you might see at a village fete, to pretty extensive settlements featuring tents of various sizes, bars, merch stalls, and stages worthy of a rock festival, culminating in a Main Stage in the middle of it all, where the big guns tend to get rolled out. There are old tankies, young Revolutionary Communists, the Anti-Fascist Action people and of course the mainstream leftish parliamentary parties with their slightly glossier brochures and proper bars which serve keg IPA rather than cans of Carlsberg. There are bands playing and speakers speaking and lots of clapping. It’s a good day out. Scottish friends of mine who have witnessed May Day in Copenhagen have commented to me before that Danes seem particularly good at this sort of thing and have a knack of making what is essentially a public drinking session in the park seem more classy than would be the case if this was, say Motherwell. People sit with rugs, there are kids, and there is a sense of everyone ‘making a day of it’. Even going for a slash in the bushes seems somehow less sordid, less po-(as it were)-faced, more smiley. The Danish attitude to alcohol in general probably bears closer examination. People start young – 16 is the legally permitted age to drink beer, wine but not spirits – and so it has always felt to me as though they’ve got binge-drinking out of their systems by the time they hit their twenties. Public quaffing is not illegal and so having a beer in your hand in, say a park or on a street corner is not necessarily seen as the mark of being what in Scotland might be called a ‘jakey’ – a street drunk. That’s not say that jakeys don’t exist at all. Indeed there are many public benches throughout the city which are unofficially, and more or less permanently commandeered by a steadfast community of ‘øldrikker’ or beer-drinkers. There’s a wonderful film from 2000 called Bænken by director Per Fly about this very community. And yet despite the lack of furtiveness about drinking, and despite some alarming stats which state that 1 in 5 Danes are ‘heavy drinkers’ the Danes seem to have somehow avoided the label of being a nation that …. you know,…‘takes a drink’. We still have this notion that Scandinavians are blond, upright specimens whose amply funded health service is sadly under-used since the population all cycle everywhere and look like Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Scotland, on the other hand has, as a drinking nation, managed an equally baffling sleight of hand. If you are at all au-fait with Instagram, you’ll be aware that there’s a whole genre of short videos or reels which feature heavily intoxicated Scots, essentially ‘jakeys’, making fools of themselves to great hilarity. My nineteen year old daughter, when quizzed, was familiar with a list of about ten of these vignettes, all of which are apparently part of the familiar cultural firmament gazed upon by her and her peers.
One example, the iconic “It’s No a Bank Machine”, may suffice to illustrate my point.
There are loads of these around, they’re awfully funny and they contribute to a kind of consensus, one to which, if pushed, I would probably also subscribe. It’s that Scotland’s public relationship to the drink is one in which a kind of all-pervasive drunkenness that would in any other context be perceived as tragic or pathetic nevertheless seems to achieve a kind of existentially subversive, yet perversely life-affirming quality. There’s undoubtedly more than a grain of truth in this thesis. For example, I’m unsure that analogous films of piss-artists on the street in say, Birmingham or Saint Petersburg would have the same merry appeal. They would be like those eerie films of the Kensington neighbourhood in Philadelphia, where whole street corners of zonked out fentanyl addicts stand motionless in a tableau like a flock of flamingos, all apparently simultaneously doubled over looking for a coin they’ve just dropped on the pavement. That which, on the face of it, is essentially a portrayal of rather sordid abuse of intoxicants would be revealed as just that. So what gives? Is it just the accent? At the risk of being both banal and reductive I sometimes think that it’s in the walk, the exaggerated shuffle perfected by Billy Connolly at 2:48 here. a kind of ‘gallusness’ or bravado in the gait, a demonstration of life-force which underlies any incapacity or indeed slight loss of sense of direction brought on by the effects of alcohol – what my dad sometimes described as ‘having a wee weave on’. The tendency of Scots to burst into song and dance after a drink also surely serves to help. I’ve also seen a number of other reels, a kind of related side-genre, which all seem to follow the same basic storyline: over a period of minutes, a street busker performing a song on the street will seem to touch some sort of nerve of communal bonhomie, leading a bunch of strangers, inexplicably always on a pedestrian street in the centre of Glasgow, to gather and burst into impromptu, often ungainly, dancing and chanting of choruses, as though they were all getting joyfully hammered at a family wedding. Quite frankly it looks like great fun.
However the downside of this is that I can’t help thinking that perhaps we Scots may revel in this stereotype somewhat, and can on occasion be less loveable than we think we are. I don’t know…
At any rate, there were surely more people than usual in Nørrebro with a weave on last Friday. Due to (ironically enough) work commitments I wasn’t able to be at Mayday this year, which was a pity as it’s the kind of thing that can sometimes catch me unawares and leave me with a bit of a lump in my throat. This is usually when a group of people earnestly sing The Internationale or especially if I catch sight of the anarchists as all they troop in together to the park, all pasty-faced in black with their clump of black and red flags. They are normally quite a small group, and seem somehow slightly resentful of having to march alongside socialists and communists. They seem often to be largely young, or at least young at heart, even if they are actually grizzled punks or earnest older university lecturer types. They are also often a little bit angrier than everyone else and this anger often brings a little tear to my eye (as many things do as one gets older) and I’m not entirely sure why. And then I’m reminded of this speech that I wrote for a character in a theatre piece on the subject of anger and rage , but ended up not using..
“When I was a young man I called myself an anarchist for a brief period.
Of course I did. It’s logical when you’re young, because you believe that people are basically good. Yes you know that there are idiots and arseholes in the world, but they are the exception rather than the rule. We can deal with them.
Of course we can. When I was young I had only recently realized that I, myself might be able to deal with them, and so I was quite proud of having acquired this skill. This skill, such as it was, mostly involved ignoring them and staying out of their way. That was it. This was easy, as for the most part their paths and mine didn’t cross each other. I could do this. I wanted to practice this skill.
I had also just learned how to love, as an adult loves. It was fun and so I wanted to practice this skill even more. Doesn’t everyone? Don’t we want to love each other? So why wouldn’t you want to be an anarchist? Why would you make power structures that stand in the way of letting people do that?
Maybe you would do that because you didn’t have the same skills that they had. Or because you just wanted to tell people what to do for the sake of it.
When I was young that seemed less fun than just hanging out with them. That seemed just weird.
Maybe people who aren’t anarchists are just weird. They think power is more fun than love. If they are weird then that’s fine, but anyone who lives in the modern world knows that the weirdness of those in power is unfortunately enacted on those who have less power than they do. Their paths do, in fact, cross ours.
Maybe this is why the anger of anarchists makes me weep a little bit. They look like they still think that hanging out with people is more fun than having power over them.”