When I was an undergraduate at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), I read a great deal, unfortunately, my teachers might have said, this activity along with student politics distracted me from the main focus of a degree in classical and modern Chinese which was to master the language. As any student of Chinese would tell you that endeavour entails hour upon hour of rote learning of Chinese characters, while the reading of set texts required one’s nose to be permanently inserted between the pages of a dictionary. I’d gone to university wanting to become more clever, and more knowledgeable, and yet in the first year, I felt like I was back in primary school learning the alphabet. In reaction, I did a good deal of extra-curricular reading. And when I read, I’d read voraciously, bulimically even. The past few days I’ve been trying to recall the books, aside from books about China, that I read.
I can’t at this stage put my reading into any chronological order, but I was very interested in politics and that drew me to a literature that was eclectic but intensely interesting, and often enjoyable. Although like most of my contemporaries I was interested in the politics of China – I'd often heard my grandfather in conversation with his friends talk of Mou Chak Tung (Mao Tse-tung 毛澤東) and Cheung Kai Shek (Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石). But, I was no Maoist. What attracted me to the study of China and Chinese was my family's story and the translations of "classical" poetry I'd read as a schoolboy. In fact, my immediate interest in politics stemmed especially from the Chilean refugee community I'd come to know between high school and university. They were refugees from Pinochet's Chile who arrived in the UK in 1974. I threw myself into trying to understand the politics of Chile and its fragmented left-wing landscape. I'd already done a lot of reading about Latin America – having done Spanish to a fairly high level (A and S level if those arcane UK qualifications say anything to you) – and had been reading all the major contemporary Latin American novelists and poets. I was passionate about Pablo Neruda well before I met my Chilean friends. Amongst the poets I read were also Nicolás Guillén and José María Heredia. Amongst the novelists, apart from García Márquez whose novels and short stories opened a whole new imaginary for me, I remember being struck by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his Tres tristes tigres (three sad tigers). It was a fictional wonder world, but to understand the context, you really needed to get a grip on the politics.

Latin American contemporary literature was a far cry from the contemporary scene in China at that time. When I started learning Chinese at university, the Cultural Revolution was still ongoing, the official literature little more than crude propaganda. It would be several years before we learnt there was an underground literary scene that was waiting to be "discovered". Fortunately, as I pursued my studies, poetry in particular, I was able to maintain the link to Spanish- and particularly French-language poetry through the 1930s Chinese poets who'd taken them as models to emulate in their construction of a new vernacular modern Chinese poetry. 

Meanwhile, I continued to read modern European fiction. I also have a vivid memory reading Sartre well into the night – I often stayed up reading until 4am. It was a winter's evening and I recall it vividly because it was snowing. Pig-headedly, I insisted on reading his trilogy L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) in the original, so it took some time. I wasn't convinced by the philosophy but the historical context fascinated me. I'd read L'Étranger/The Outsider when doing French at school, and continued to read Camus. I also read all of Beckett's plays in French - they were quite accessible. And, of course, because of the China connection, I read the fabulator André Malraux's La condition humaine/Man's Estate for what it was worth.

The only English-language novelist I read extensively while an undergraduate was George Orwell; an eclectic basket of English novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Hemingway, Kingsley Amis, Laurie Lee, Aldous Huxley and others had been left behind in Liverpool. Orwell's 1984 spoke strongly to someone studying the language and culture of the totalitarian state that was China. And, of course, Homage to Catalonia for its account of the politics of the Spanish civil war. But, I also read everything of his I could find. And on the recommendation of a Malaysian fellow student – in fact he was an aspiring barrister at the Inns of Court – I read all five Penguin volumes of The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell.

In terms of political texts, even before university I'd read the Communist Manifesto and rudimentary introductions to Marxism, in particular David McClellan's Marx that had just been published by Fontana Press (1975). It would be years later before I discovered the real gems that were Henri Lefebvre's Le Marxisme, (1948) and Pour connaître la pensée de Marx (1948). SOAS had a very politicized student body. When I arrived in the autumn of 1975, I was struck by a bright red slogan scrawled over the wall of the student bar: Victory to the Viet Cong; Saigon had fallen at the end of April. Student politics were dominated on the one hand by the Communist Party of Great Britain and its Labour student allies, and on the other by the International Socialists, a Trotskyist party (later to become the Socialist Workers Party); I was attracted to Trotsky's writings and to the political figure in exile in Mexico, but not to the contemporary British manifestations of Trotskyism. Maoism was even more of a turn-off, and unlike in France and Germany, it failed to attract the younger generation in search of a radical alternative. And then, of course, Eurocommunism oblige there was Antonio Gramsci. I read his Prison Notebooks and was enthralled. At that time I hadn't yet realised his key place in the landscape of cultural studies, and even Raymond Williams I knew mainly for his work on drama, especially his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. The Liverpool Everyman theatre put on some magnificent productions of both playwrights in the early 1970s when Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite and Bill Nighy were part of the company. I recall a wonderfully ludic production of The Good Woman of Szechwan. When at university I bought Williams's George Orwell: a collection of critical essays and his Fontana Modern Masters Orwell; later Williams would turn against Orwell berating what he perceived as Orwell's rejection of Marxism and his chauvinism. Alongside Williams stood the historian E.P. Thompson whose The Making of the English Working Class awoke in me an understanding that there were alternative ways of perceiving and writing history. Similarly eye-opening was Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy who like Williams paved the way to cultural studies as a philosophy and a discipline. 


Midway through my undergraduate years, I specialised in "Chinese" poetry which comprised both pre-modern and modern poetry, and it was the modern poets' interest in Russian and Soviet poets that led me to Mayakovsky and Esenin. But the great revelation was nothing to do with the poetry course, rather it was my discovery of Victor Serge. Serge, a dissident Belgian-born Russian revolutionary unmasked in his writing the reality behind Stalin's Soviet Union. I read Serge's novel S'il est minuit dans le siècle/Midnight in the Century, and then anything else of his I could find. His novels helped me to understand what the lived reality of communism in China must be like. There was an extensive correspondence between Serge and Trotsky. And although there was much initial sympathy between them, they disagreed over the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) which Serge supported, as did Orwell, during the Spanish Civil War. Serge also contested the timeliness of the founding of the Fourth International, and insisted on a transparent reappraisal of the Kronstadt mutiny. These points of dissension eventually led to an acrimonious rupture between them. Serge like Trotsky ended his days in Mexico. Trotsky died with a Stalinist ice pick in his head, while Serge ostensibly died of a heart attack while hailing a taxi, although it later transpired that Soviet security ran a cell of liquidators within the cab-driving fraternity.

At the same time, I didn't neglect books about Chinese studies. I read whatever I could find. In my first year, I was even engrossed in everything written about Chinese legal history. Later, when I spent a summer semester in Taiwan, I took advantage of pirated editions of works on Chinese law literature and society sold by the celebrated Cave's bookstore and bought all the books I couldn't afford back home. Taiwan was not a party to international copyright conventions and the pirated editions were cheap. I bought Needham's Science and Civilisation in China and dozens of the standard translations of pre-modern poetry. However, modern works of literature were severely censored and modern 1920s-1940s works by writers who'd stayed on mainland China were banned by Chiang Ching-kuo who remained loyal to his recently deceased father, Chiang Kai-shek's strict anti-communist stance. My last day in Taiwan was also the day I received a rare treasure. I'd met and became friendly with a young man who declared his politics to be anti-imperialist. He made a living out of exporting basic stationary essentials such as pencils and pens. Our first encounter had been at an open-air hillside restaurant not far from the National Palace Museum. It was the first time I'd seen and eaten Black Chicken. I'd just gone through Taipei airport customs and was about to board the plane for Hong Kong when I was tapped on the shoulder by a security guard who handed me a large, heavy brown envelope and pointed back along the corridor to my acquaintance who was waving from behind the barrier. Opening the package on the plane, I found a copy of an early wood-block edition of the Jinpingmei 金瓶梅, a sixteenth-century fictional work celebrated in part known for its risqué content. And thus were Taiwan customs circumvented.

In the fourth and final year of my degree, I was studying modern poetry in earnest. Given the affection the Francophile and Hispanophile Chinese poets showed for modern French and Spanish poetry, I was able to indulge my own interest in French poetry by simply following up on theirs. Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Mallarmé were all known and frequently translated by the early twentieth-century poets. García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, and Azorín were all translated from the Spanish into Chinese by the poet Dai Wangshu 戴望舒 about whose life and work I would later write my PhD thesis. However, as an undergraduate I was chiefly attracted to the poetry of Ai Qing 艾青. After the 1949 Communist victory, many established writers of the pre-1949 era chose to retreat into translation or the study of pre modern literature or even oracle bones - anything that was not immediately politically sensitive. Ai Qing  – the father of the now celebrated artist  Ai Weiwei 艾未未 – was one of the few poets to carry on plying his craft. Now, he simply chose to avoid sensitive subjects by writing uniquely about experiences inspired by his trips abroad. One such trip was to Latin America, during which he visited Pablo Neruda on Isla Negra where the Chilean poet was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He dedicated a long poem to Neruda describing his Isla Negra home. It was called "On a Chilean Promontory" 在智利的海岬上. I came across the poem in the magazine Renmin wenxue 人民文學 (People's Literature) in the SOAS library one day, it was one of the last poems Ai Qing published before being exiled for his political crimes. It was during my final year that Ai Qing after over a decade of exile, literally, in the desert that Ai Qing resurfaced. He'd been assumed dead. In fact, he'd been comparatively lucky, many of his contemporaries had fallen foul of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976); but Ai Qing had in large part been punished for standing up to Mao's anti-writer policies back in the 1940s and was banished well before the Cultural Revolution. It was a couple of years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when Ai Qing was finally "rehabilitated". His friend Neruda was no more. He had seemingly succumbed to cancer a few days after Allende was toppled by a CIA-backed coup d'état on 11 September 1973; sixty years later it would be found that Neruda had in fact been assassinated by poisoning. The poem was not part of my undergraduate modern poetry syllabus, which was not meant to extend beyond the Republican era (1912-1949); poems written in the 1950s somehow fell off the spectrum. I, nevertheless, translated the poem into English and then with my Chilean friend Hernán Rosenkranz into Spanish. We sent it off to a literary review called Araucaria but heard no more about it. China at that time was an ally of the USA with which it stood in the final phase of the Cold War against the Soviet bloc. In such a geopolitical context, it was unsurprising that a poem written by a Chinese communist poet would not be received gladly. But, for years I still thought the poem ought to be published, all the more so after Hernán himself had died. Finally, some 45 years after it was translated, with the intercession of Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco, the poem was finally published in the Mexican review Nexos; you can find it here: Ai Qing: Un poema para Neruda. For some twenty-five years, I'd taught the "Chilean" poems of Ai Qing – there were several – and thus in a sense this particular circle was closed – the extra-curricular had become curricular.

After my undergraduate degree I obtained a scholarship to study for two years at Peking University. But in order to get there there was one further Chilean link I had to use. I'd understood that UK students studying literature were automatically sent to the north-eastern university of Shenyang. Having heard reports from students who'd already studied there I had no desire to follow them, I wanted to be at the heart of things. I found out that in order to study at Peking University the only course open to me would be Political Economy - a Marxist discipline which masked the study of economics that was only just being reinstated in the university. I turned to Benny Pollack, a friend of Hernán Rosenkranz and a professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool. Benny and Hernán would later write together the definitive work Revolutionary Social Democracy: The Chilean Socialist Party (1986). I explained my predicament to Benny Pollack who very graciously wrote me a letter of recommendation setting out my competence in politics and economics. I then spent the summer before I left for China mugging up on Marxist economic theory so as to give some semblance of truth to the legend. Years later, after the fall of Pinochet's regime, Benny would be appointed Chilean ambassador to China.

My years in China were less about reading and more about lived experience: Listening and talking to Chinese people who'd lived through the 1950s to 1970s, travelling and recording what I saw through my camera lens; photography has long been a passion and it was put to constant use in China. But, the reading I'd done over the previous four years prove to be an indispensable asset for understanding the political and social system I encountered. It would also form the foundation of doctoral work back in London. But that is another story.

A few weeks ago, I promised to return to the work of André Gorz, and it was while re-reading the re-edition of Gorz's book L'immatériel, that I came across a reference to the work of Moshe Postone. Gorz was writing in 2004 by which time Postone had become quite an academic celebrity in the world of critical theory. I'd rubbed shoulders with Moshe while at the University of Chicago, and so Gorz's reference brought back some memories.
We'd met at faculty cocktail parties and get-togethers in Hyde Park, - almost everyone lived around the campus in this small academic enclave in the middle of South Side Chicago.  We had the same circle of colleagues/friends.  We also both had carrels – small offices where you could hide away – in the University of Chicago's Regenstein library a magnificent institution to which, along side the Seminary Co-op bookstore, I owe a huge part of my education. We had coffee a couple of times in the minuscule, subterranean, refreshment room in the basement of the library.
Moshe was a kind man and tolerated me, a junior academic, talking to him about my work, while I struggled to comprehend the labyrinthine complexities of his. Postone's magnum opus Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, (1993) was about to come out, while I was working on a chapter of my Troubadours book manuscript. The chapter dealt with contestatory rock music in 1980s China, in particular that of the musician Cui Jian, and I was looking at the phenomenon both in terms of cultural resistance and of hybridity in Homi Bhabha's sense. My time at Chicago (1990-1994) fell just after the Tiananmen débâcle and during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Radical academics - while not dyed in the wool Marxist-Leninists – were uncomfortable with the demise of "actually existing socialism", as the Soviet system was known. That I should apply the kind of critical approach to post-Mao China as they did to capitalist societies made me something of an oddity. But not so much with Postone. He did seem a little dubious about my take on the political impact and function of rock music in post-Mao China – he was after all close to Adorno's ideas and the German critic's views on the validity of studying popular music and had a nefarious effect on popular music studies for decades. Nevertheless, he was open to my critical approach to contemporary China since his reinterpretation of Marxist theory made it legitimate to critique "state capitalist" societies alongside post-war capitalist societies in the West, since "traditional Marxism struggle[d] to account for capitalism as it enters its Keynesian-Fordist phase and cannot adequately formulate a critique of the Soviet Union (since in both societies, the state has some form of control over the distribution of goods...)".* And, what went for the Soviet Union could naturally be mapped onto Marxist-Leninist China, especially after the return to power of Deng Xiaoping.
Postone, although already an oustanding intellectual force, had been mistreated by the university and survived on positions that were very much beneath his stature. While Chicago had a reputation for taking in and nurturing European Jewish liberal intellectuals, such empathy did not extend to the unorthodox Postone. Just after I left the university he was refused a tenured position in sociology. It was hardly surprising, this was the same university that had refused Homi Bhabha's appointment while pointing to his "rebarbative prose". Both decisions were challenged and both overturned. Postone was ultimately given a position in the History department. I found the University of Chicago an establishment that wanted people to crawl while jumping through hoops, if you didn't like crawling then you could walk away. Moshe did neither, stood his ground and was supported by his colleagues. I walked; I left in 1994 when I took up a position at Hong Kong University. Moshe was recognised for the great intellect he was in his later years as he bravely struggled with cancer. I'm glad to have known him.
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*Anke Devyver, "Freedom and Dialectics: On the Critical Theory of Moishe Postone and Theodor Adorno", Philosophy & Social Criticism, 21 (1), 2025, p. 52.
Moshe Postone,Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory,Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Moshe Postone, Temps, travail et domination sociale : Une réinterprétation de la théorie critique de Marx, Mille et une Nuits, 2009.
See also:THE MOISHE POSTONE LEGACY PROJECT https://thects.org/moishe-postone

“People don’t flood, and people don’t flow. People migrate, they move, they arrive, they pass through, they travel”.†

Listening this morning to the radio reports of the tens of thousands of Moroccans crossing the border into the North African Spanish "possession", aka "enclave", of Ceuta – which in reality is a left-over colony – I was impelled to write this blogpost. It's something I have written about before, but it bears repeating. As I always say to my students, it's not because you've made a breakthrough or think you've said the last word about an ideological shibboleth that you can sit back assuming the job is done. In interventionist academic work, the intervention needs to be continuous.
For some thirty years, I have been studying the discourse on racism and metaphors relating to water. My first text on the "Inundation metaphor" was in Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers (Duke UP, 1996): Chapter 7  "Fear of Drowing: Pure nations, hybrid bodies, excluded cultures".* Here's an extract:
"Unwanted immigrants of colour everywhere have frequently been described as "pouring in," "swamping," "flooding in," as coming in "tides" and "waves." In the [September 29, 1854] New York Tribune editorial, the phobia of death by drowning in an alien and unclean fluid is invoked. The metaphor alludes to an allied and recurrent image typical of this racist discourse, that of the fear of contamination, the terror of being made unclean by the filthy and sick. In Klaus Theweleit's 1987 study of the construction of the fascist, racist narrative which would be concretized in Germany's Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, in which the flood is the red flood of bolshevism, "a kind of ocean that surges on in waves, inundating and engulfing," he isolates the power of the inundation metaphor in a discourse of hate which was, of course, quintessentially racist."
Anti-immigrant, racist discourse is present in multifarious texts. I recall when I was a child in the 1960s seeing an elaborate racist, anti-black ditty which someone had written down. It intimated that black people were coming to England to scrounge on the white people's welfare state. I can recall one line clearly: "They come here and wash in Tide." There was a play on the word "tide" since "Tide" was, and still is, a popular brand of laundry detergent. There was the implication not only that the Other was entering the country illicitly at the country's seaboard, and thus uncontrolled and in great numbers, but also that s/he was  unused to washing and ignorant as to the difference between toilet soap and clothes washing detergent. This made the immigrant not only an object of derision, but someone ultimately unassimilable.
In my academic work, I have focused in particular on the press, from late nineteenth-century California to present-day Europe. Today the targets are Moroccans, and following the recent crossing of tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco to Ceuta, the media have once again trotted out their repertoire of clichés, associating human beings seeking a chance to live – rather than merely to survive – with dangerous waters that threaten to overwhelm Europe. This comparison between the movement of people and that of waves and ‘human tides’ has been going on for several centuries. Journalists, even so-called 'serious journalists' repeat this suite of metaphors without giving it a second thought. Is this a shortcut born of laziness, or an unconscious adherence to a dominant racist narrative? On the positive side, for the past ten years or so, I've been gratified to see that not only academic authors but also American public radio stations have taken note of my comments on this subject; at least, it's a start.
In whichever language and on whichever continent you get your news, I'm sure that journalists are using a variation on the inundation metaphor to describe current migration stories. It's easy to let these things go, but we should all call out these instances of easy recourse to racist metaphors whether employed consciously or not. That's what I did this morning when I wrote to the Mediator of Radio France to point out that journalists were employing the term marée humaine (human tide) to describe the recent passage to the other side of the border of thousands of individual Moroccans (you can see that message here).
So, don't let it go by. Do react.

* Troubadours is also available at archive.org : archive.org/details/troubadourstrump0000leeg
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

We are inhabited by abyssal forces that poetry alone has the power to fathom. Raoul Vaneigem

I don't go in for heroes, but I have throughout my life and career been drawn to a clutch of thinkers and their writings to which I turn again and again. Prominent amongst them has been the unorthodox French theorist who never set foot in a university and who was the leading light of the Situationist movement, Guy Debord (1931-1994). For some time the Situationists were shunned by the global academic community in favour of the more respectable pantheon of French theorists Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, the perpetuators of Heideggerism in France. Where the Situationists were the first radical thinkers to perceptively critique Maoist China* for what it was – a concentrated, totalitarian spectacle, the Left-Bank fashionable theorists continued well into the 1980s to construct the Maoist revolution as the Orientalist utopian paradise they wished it to be. It is perhaps no coincidence that those French intellectuals who remain apologists for Mao and Pol Pot similarly continue to carry the flame for Heidegger.†

Alongside Debord stands the Belgian writer, activist and theorist Raoul Vaneigem (1834-2026), whose  1967 Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations is credited with having underpinned the 1968 movement in France. The work is translated into English as The Revolution of Everyday Life, an appropriate title given the Situationists were  – along with Henri Lefebvre with whom Debord had a brief but meaningful intellectual honeymoon –  advanced theorists of the notion of daily life. Vaneigem throughout his long life would actively engage in thinking about ecology and the environment and continually critiqued the société marchande, or society of consumption, the veritable target of Debord's Society of the spectacle, or  "show" society.

In my previous blogpost I wrote about André Gorz's position on work. Since I did so Raoul Vaneigem has died. Together with Guy Debord, Vaneigem was an acerbic critic of the ideology of work, and continued to be so throughout his life. The praise of work and its redemptive, character-building qualities – what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger – form part of the ideological discourse of work, a discourse firmly challenged by Vaneigem. “The celebration of work, which according to Marx, transforms the world while exploiting Nature, and the Nietzschean propension to exalt the superior mind have each served as the Te Deum and De profundis for fascist and bolshevik states and corrupt democracies alike,” wrote Vaneigem (De la destinée, p. 11). However, Vaneigem pushes this back further than the era of industrial capitalism and its discontents, further back even than Christianity, in a reflection that would project the Anthropocene back several thousand years before the “modern” era: “ten thousand years of beliefs and thoughts…have founded, on the dogma of life reduced to survival, truths reputed to be eternal. Whereas, as contradictory as they may be, what they all have in common is the celebration of having over being” (De la destinée, p. 23).

Concern with the environment in Vaneigem’s thinking obliges us to think back beyond the conventional critiques of capitalism and colonialism to a stage in humanity’s domination of the non-human extending back eight to ten thousand years, to the “emergence of an economic and social system which giving free rein to the pillage of vital resources, distorted humankind” (De la destinée,p. 27). Work was and remains central to such domination:

“The appropriation and exploitation of the earth imposes work as a dominant activity. The ability to create, the true specificity of humankind, is left devalued and marginalized. Creativity is incompatible with work, since, implying self-enjoyment and the enjoyment of the world, it invalidates appropriation…. Creativity is to humankind what work is to the alienated human being” (De la destinée, p. 31).

Work, does indeed transform the world, but it reduces humankind to the status of a miserable beast obliged to yield to circumstances it itself fabricates while turning the world into a commodity (De la Destinée, pp. 31-32). And, it is the emergence of commodity-centred society that has provoked a veritable regression of human kind. If we look at the current climatic crisis and its effects, if we look at the millions of migrants seeking just mere survival, it can all be put down to an economic system which century after century has led us against our own interests to the current impasse and assigned us to a “programmed death”.

Much of what Vaneigem has written over the past six decades has proven to be uncannily prescient. For instance, a passage that Vaneigem wrote in 1986, before the declaration of the now already jaded New World Order, reads like a gloss on current far right populist ideology and its grip on so much of humanity. Addressing people's fear in the face of the crumbling economic order, rather than the joy that might be expected at the prospect of beneficial change, Vaneigem writes of “consumers reduced to a basic state of frailty and decrepitude” begging for “strong-armed protection as they rush through the well-lit, clearly displayed aisles of consumable hedonism.” “To what can one attribute this terror,” asks Vaneigem. To which he replies, to “the panic of having to create their own lives” (Movement of the Free Spirit, pp 2021). As I have written before, this reflection always reminds me of the bluesman B. B. King’s inimitable refrain “I've got a good mind to give up living, and go shopping instead.”

Ultimately, it is the old Situationist, libertarian distinction between life (vie) and mere survival (survie) – “surviving thus far has prevented us from living” (Traité) – in which we may discern a horizon of hope, for it is “the passion to live that joyfully reiterates itself. Death is just a tedious repetition" (De la destinée p. 235).

Modified 2.08.2026
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For free access to a comprehensive library of Debord's, Vaneigem's and other Situationist texts go to Situationist International Archive https://situationist.org/ 

† Witness the ever fashionable Alain Badiou,"Mao thinks in an almost infinite way"; Badiou's fidelity to Heidegger is amply documented.

* Guy Debord, “Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine”, Internationale Situationniste, no 11, octobre 1967, pp. 499-508. https://classiques.uqam.ca/contemporains/debord_guy/point_explosion_ideologie_chine/explosion_ideologie_chine_texte.html

Raoul Vaneigem,Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations, 1967.
Raoul Vaneigem, Mouvement du Libre-Esprit, Paris, Ramsay, 1986; Movement of the Free Spirit, New York, NY, Zone Books, 1994.
Raoul Vaneigem, De la destinée, Paris, Le Cherche midi, 2015.

I'll be "away from my desk" for the next week or so, but before I go, I just wanted to say that the revised, expanded version of André Gorz's text L'Immatériel has finally been published twenty years after it was completed and nineteen years after its author's death.i Artificial intelligence was in its infancy two decades ago, but Gorz (1923-2007) had already understood that capitalism would evolve towards a system in which the source of value would be chiefly immaterial.
But who was Gorz? Born Gerhart Hirsch in Vienna, his father, an Ashkenazi Jew, changed his name to Horst in 1930 in an attempt to shield the family from rising anti-semitism. In 1939, Gérard Horst, as he now was, took refuge in Switzerland. His initial training was as a chemical engineer, but he was also passionately interested in philosophy, and in particular in Husserl and Sartre. Having moved to Paris in 1949, and taking the pen-name Michel Bosquet, he became a journalist. He frequented Sartre and became intellectually invested in existentialist Marxism. As a consequence he accorded an important place in his thinking to the issues of alienation and liberation. Indeed, philosophy for Gorz was focused “on the question of alienation and, naturally, on the means of overcoming it: disalienation, liberation, emancipation – which, in a way, are the cornerstones of Gorzian philosophy, either from an individual or a collective vantage point or, better still, as the connection between the two”.ii In his 1959 La morale de l'histoire, he wrote: "My point of departure was always the experience of alienation”.
Writing in post-war France, he identified consumption, or rather the "obligation to consume", as the fundamental alienation of the capitalist society of abundance: "The obligation to consume to keep the economy going, that one has to consume in order to be able to work, and not the other way around" in a socio-economy where the work of millions of workers "is destined to be wasted, has no meaning and remains enslaved to its products."iii
Work and labour were a central interest in Gorz's journalism as in his theoretical endeavours. In the 1970s he became increasingly interested in the function of technology in relation to labour, writing in 1973 that "Capitalist techniques have the political function of perpetuating the dependence of workers, their subordination, their separation from the means and process of production."iv Gorz saw automation not just as a means of enhancing productivity, but as a concern "with assuring capital the maximum power and control over living labour,"  a "concern for power …at least as decisive as the concern for productivity." v
Ungrowth
But, perhaps, Gorz's major contribution to late twentieth-century political debate was his role in foregrounding questions of limits and developing ecological thinking. It was in 1972 that Gorz started to discuss "décroissance", degrowth or ungrowth, and criticized Marx for his materialism confined to an economism that ignores the natural limits to wealth creation and capital accumulation. Convinced, as was Jacques Ellul, by the need for limiting consumption he wrote: "human activity finds its external limit in nature and ignoring this limit provokes a backlash....the consumption of limited resources will inevitably end up exhausting them completely....the issue is therefore not to consume more and more but to consume less and less." vi
For Gorz, humankind was part of the natural order at the time of the fishers and hunters. However, this perceived harmony was because they lacked the technological ability to dominate nature, not because of a philosophical outlook: "It is not because they wished to live in peace with nature that they did not intervene in its cycles but because they did not have the tools that would have allowed such interventions. The domination of nature began as soon as people became sedentary and developed efficient tools."vii Ultimately, humankind's relationship to so-called "Nature" was cultural, or as he put it: "The relationship of humankind to nature is not a natural relationship but always a cultural one, based on metaphysical or religious conceptions....The question that humanity faces - and already did in Antiquity - is that of the cultural self-limitation (self-restraint Selbstbegrenzung) of its needs and projects…. In pre-capitalist societies, this self-restraint was self-evident. It was demanded by the social order....These restrictions were removed by the bourgeois-capitalist revolution, in favour of the "market society", which in reality is a non-society. At present it is a question of restricting again the rights of economic reason by subordinating it to ecological and social goals." ix
Although Gorz is here very close to the work and conclusions of his contemporary Jacques Ellul he makes no reference to him; nevertheless, just like Ellul, he quoted and frequented Ivan Illich. Was this merely the disdain of the Marxist Gorz for the anarchist Ellul?
The proximity of Gorz's self-limitation and Ellul's self-imposition of limits is something I'll return to in future blogposts. For now, I hope this brief summary of Gorz's thought has been of some use.

i André Gorz, L'Immatériel: Connaissance, valeur et capital. Paris, Gallimard, 2026. 
ii André Gorz: Thinker of Emancipation by Christophe Fourel & Francoise Gollain , 28 August 2014, translated by Susannah Dale. https://booksandideas.net/Andre-Gorz-Thinker-of-Emancipation.html
iii Gorz, La morale de l'histoire, Paris, Seuil, pp.254-255 
iv Gorz, Critique de la division du travail, Paris, Seuil, 1973.
v In Françoise Gollain, Une critique du travail : Entre écologie et socialisme. Suivi d'un entretien avec André Gorz, Paris, La Découverte, 2000.
vi Gorz, Ecologie et politique, 1975 ; Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA, Southend Press,1980.
vii Gorz, Ecologie et politique, 1975 ; Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA, Southend Press,1980.
ix André Gorz Le fil rouge de l’écologie Entretiens inédits en français, Paris, Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2015

It's a hot summer here in France, and today I was thinking about my first French summer, and what for me at the time – I was 16 – was an epic journey hitch-hiking down through France and Spain. It was the school holidays and there not being much money around it was either hitch-hike or stay at home. What little money I had I invested in a ticket to get me across the English Channel. I remember that even as a boy I deeply resented the economic barrier to my freedom of movement that Britain's insularity represented, the fact I had to pay to get off the island. I found that deeply unfair. It was a sentiment strengthened that summer by my being able to walk across the Franco-Spanish and Franco-Belgian frontiers for free. 
Those of you who read this blog regularly will know of my passion for the photographic image. But, I did not always have access to cameras. And I made that trip without one. And yet, the images I have in my mind of my time on the road are as vivid as yesterday.
For me it was pure adventure. I won't pretend there weren't moments when I was scared of travelling alone. I tried to team up with people in youth hostels along the way, but most people were already travelling in pairs, and in any case if you wanted to catch a ride it was better to be on your own. Of course, I can't imagine letting a child of mine undertake that kind of journey today. My mother later told me that every day I was gone she lived in fear. We had no phone at home and in any case the cost of a phone call was prohibitive, so she had to make do with the occasional postcard.
The trip didn't start well. Having caught the bus down to London's Victoria station I let my self be conned out of some of my precious pounds while in the queue for the boat-train. A man with a trans-Atlantic accent claiming to work for NATO in Brussels promised to give me a lift once we got to the other side. He asked me for change to get some beers for the journey and I gave it to him, only to gradually realize I'd never see him again. The next morning I woke up having slept in a Brussels railway station platform waiting room, and set off hitch-hiking.
The first night I was in Mons, the next day I got as far as Paris. And after a few relatively expensive days in Paris living off bread and cheese, I set off in the direction of Spain and got as far as Bordeaux. The next day I got a ride with a man who evidently was interested in more than just chatting, but managed to fend him off and get another lift as far as Bayonne. I'd arranged to meet a couple of Danish boys I'd met in Mons. Miraculously they showed up. We were staying in a large shed-like dormitory that passed for a youth hostel, and we bought cheap white wine. I didn't drink much of it, but enough to learn the next morning what a hangover felt like. In Franco's Spain, hitch-hiking was frowned upon, and traffic in any case was sparse. So, I spent some of my precious pesetas on trains and travelled down from the Basque country to Catalonia. My cultural referents were not sophisticated, I hadn't yet read Orwell, but I had read Laurie Lee's Spain-based autobiography As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was in the town of Lérida, today better known as Lleida, I first heard that summer's ubiquitous tune, Gershon Kingsley's Moog synthesizer-generated Popcorn which in 1972 was a worldwide hit for Hot Butter. 
One of my most colourful memories was travelling over the Pyrenees from Lerida towards Andorra with a bus full of Spanish army recruits and watching the sun go down over the mountain: an orange golden purple sunset the like of which I'd never seen. It's an image that has remained a reference for me when looking at any other sunset.
With some of the money I still had, I invested in a bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker in Andorra thinking it would be good capital at some point in my trip. At the French border, I caught a lift in a campervan with a British family who took me as far as Perpignan. I recall them being horrified that I was travelling alone. But I wasn't the only one doing so, and some were doing worse than me. I met a lad from Liverpool at the youth hostel who'd lost all his money and his passport and was heading for the nearest British consulate to get assistance. He left me a few potatoes wrapped in newspaper. I'd been waiting at the youth hostel for a letter from home which I hoped would contain a few British pounds. But, I fell foul of the youth hostel's 3-night rule, and on the morning of the fourth day they threw me out. 
I was wandering out of town to look for somewhere to sleep when I was approached by a young tramp; perhaps today we'd say homeless person. But, like me he was travelling, and we'd been reading W. H. Davies at school. He had unkempt, mousy blond hair and seemed like he'd tumble forward as he walked rapidly down the road. He took me under his wing and a little way out of Perpignan we found a field where I produced the potatoes. He made a fire and we ate them. He taught me a few useful phrases to add to my schoolboy French and in the morning having slept in the open, me in my sleeping bag and my companion under his overcoat, we parted ways. 
I returned to the hostel hoping the letter had arrived. It hadn't, so I set off hitch-hiking again. I had pen pals in Belgium, some 1200 kilometres away. I walked out of Perpignan as I hitched, I always kept walking. I had a theory that people would be more sympathetic to someone walking than just standing in expectation at the side of the road. After a few hours trudging along the National highway - the autoroute was still a way in the future - I came across a couple of French boys who were surviving on unripe grapes from the vineyard that ran alongside the road. They wanted food and looked like they'd do anything to get it. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, I had nothing for them, neither money nor food. They'd been there for three days without catching a ride. I set off again a little more despondently. My apprehension was made worse after seeing a signboard towards the last fuel station for 100 kilometres. It was very hot and to the boy from Liverpool the surroundings looked desert-like. The song that filled my head during my road trip was Status Quo's 1970 Down the Dustpipe in which the protagonist is travelling with a ten-dollar bill in his jeans. 
I got lucky, a single man in a VW Beetle stopped for me. He confided a few minutes later he'd only stopped because from behind I looked like a girl; I had neck-length curly hair and was wearing patterned, purple jeans. He drove like a maniac, most of the time "on the wrong side of the road", overtaking traffic at what seemed to me like astronomic speeds. He was heading for Lyon. Just after nightfall, just south of the city for the first time I saw the brightly illuminated petrol refinery at Feyzin. Some, thirty years later I'd be drive past them with regularity but they'd always spark that teenage memory.  Just north of Lyon the man dropped me at the side of the road where there was a field on the right side of the road, but also a small corner shop that was still open on the left. I went in to buy some water and bread – by this point it was all I could afford – and ran into a group of four university students from Southhampton. I asked if I could bed down next to them for the night. It turned out they were travelling through France in an old, and very slow-moving black hearse. Two of them slept inside where the coffin would go, and two outside on sleeping bags. I was outside. The next day we progressed very slowly towards Paris. 
I got out at Auxerre at the junction for Belgium, walked out of the town and found a field next to a copse where I put down my sleeping bag; I always felt safer sleeping in an open field. The next morning I woke up to the sound of a combine harvester that was getting closer by the minute. It was a bright, fresh morning and it was my seventeenth birthday. 
After various acts of kindness were shown to me along the way, I eventually reached my destination in Belgium where the bottle of Johnnie Walker was duly handed over to my friend's father – a gruff, Italian, immigrant worker. It seemed to appease him. A week or so later I got back to the UK. 
We are saturated by images, so much so that as the ever-prescient Jacques Ellul could write already in 1981, people live increasingly by and through the image, and "are without a past. Living off a stream of images, each of which contains the entirety of what they need to know, they have no need for memory; they have no need to retain what they learn today."*
I have not a single photograph of that teenage trip to France and Spain. But, I feel no sense of absence. Later on I would start taking photographs of all the journeys and moments I lived through, and they are good to have. Especially when they can illustrate who and what have now disappeared.They're good when they can be used as a supplement to memory rather than its substitute. 
*La parole humiliée, Paris, Le Seuil.

We talk a good deal in academic parlance about erasure: the deletion or at best marginalization of narratives and people(s) from history. Many, most in fact, are simply absent. They've never existed in the narrative and so there's no need for actual erasure. The histories, fiction, plays and films we try to write about colonized and enslaved peoples are more often than not attempts to compensate for such absence. My book The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Chinese Seamen was just such an attempt. There were no written testimonies and almost no oral recollections from the side of the seafarer victims, and naturally no discussion between a seven-year old boy and his eighty-year old grandfather, the Chinese merchant of the title. A few families had recollections of their seafaring husbands or fathers being deported in 1946-1947. However, by and large the story of the thousands of Chinese who were illegally expelled from the United Kingdom by the government, police and Blue Funnel shipping company acting in concert, had been buried for half a century. Only a semi-fictional approach could even pretend to give them voice.
But, then there are also texts and objects that did once commemorate and celebrate, but then later were erased, or "obliterated" to use a term from the lexicon of the US President. In a previous blogpost,  I wrote about long-standing libraries in Palestine and attempts to remove them, but there are many such examples of cultural and politically iconic spaces that have been demolished, erased, deleted. I lived in China during a decade of change, the 1980s, and saw at first hand the disappearance not just of famed buildings and monuments, but also of vernacular architecture, the fabric within which daily life took place. Much of old Beijing was demolished ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, but so have many other old city centres throughout China. Those of you who follow my Photographic Archive will have seen pictures of old market streets in cities that were just coming back to life after the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. They are now all but gone; their absence aggravated by the conservation of the occasional isolated building surrounded by high-rise concrete and steel. 
When I was researching The Eighth Chinese Merchant, I returned to Anfield Cemetery to revisit the gravestones of members of the First World War British Army Chinese Labour Corps. I was surprised to find that the original stones had been replaced with bright white, newly engraved ones. What had been special about the original headstones were the Chinese characters that local Liverpool stone masons had attempted to carve into them. They were often ham-fisted and poorly executed, but although clumsy they held a special significance, they had a certain aura. They represented an effort to recall these men for posterity in their own language. I contacted the war graves authorities and several e-mails were exchanged. I simply wanted to know where the old stones had been stored; I'd hoped they could be exhibited in a local museum. Eventually the official in charge told me flatly that my quest was futile since the war graves commission policy was to destroy all old headstones as soon as they were replaced. The men's names are now carved into new stones, but the visual immediacy of how they had been remembered for some eighty years has been crushed out of existence.
I came across a photograph the other day that dates from the mid-1970s. It's a black and white shot of me posing on a podium erected by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) at Mann Island at the far end of Liverpool's famed Pier Head. The metal structure was sculpted by the – then – celebrated former Camell Laird shipyard welder turned sculptor Arthur Dooley (1929-1994). Dooley was an unconventional, gutsy character with a colourful past. In 1945, he'd served in the Irish Guards in Mandatory Palestine. He disagreed with the way the British were treating the Palestinians and deserted from the army. There is even a story about his having stolen and handed over a tank to the Arab resistance.   
 
Having served jail time for desertion, Dooley turned to studying art in London. He eventually returned to Liverpool to establish his sculptor's studio and initially supported himself by working at the Dunlop rubber factory in Speke. Years later, in 1973, when he was at the height of his career, he was commissioned together with the architect Jim Hunter to create the TGWU podium for the Pier Head. In 1971, the first big international strike saw Dunlop and Pirelli workers stage joint work stoppages in Britain and Italy to protest against layoffs, and the TGWU wanted to celebrate this landmark decision of Italian and British workers to strike in unison.  Returning to Liverpool in the 1990s I found the podium had disappeared. It had been removed when the Albert Dock area was developed into a tourist attraction. Labour disputes and their commemoration don't attract tourists. After Dooley's death in 1994, the local newspaper, The Liverpool Echo, discovered the broken-up structure rusting in a council depot.

I suppose the lesson is that remembrance, especially of the underdogs in history, is never a given, is never acquired for ever. Remembrance needs constant and continuous vigilance. The moral for writers and academics: just because you've told the story it won't be carved in stone. And even when carved in stone, as we've seen, there is no guarantee of its survival.

Some ten years ago I wrote a piece set in 2030, a utopian world where diversity of all sorts and a doctrine of limits and  “Slonomics” (slow economics) were the strategies by which disaster had been avoided and a new human culture had been established. It sounds even more fantastic now than it did a decade ago. I wrote that text as part one of an iBook entitled China Dreaming. I worked on it just after the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. Reading it over, so much of what I imagined happening later in that decade, did happen but in a more devastating fashion. For instance, I wrote: "The rich stayed rich, and the poor were disavowed," where in reality the rich have got even richer. But my focus was on the utopian, on the strategies put in place by a world youth movement, called the "Alliance for a New Human Culture", which had organized a planetary summit. The Chinese branch of the Alliance had produced a manifesto entitled Limits or Death  which called for the fixing of ceilings and limits proposed by Jacques Ellul as essential to the drawing up of a “road map for a possible future”. The manifesto concludes: "We believe it now falls to China, once colonized by, and currently the agent of the system, to fix “willed-for limits” since as Ellul taught us “it is not the unlimited that is capable of founding and constituting a culture, or a even a human being....It is by establishing limits that humans institute themselves as human.” I shan't cite any more of the text here, but I do encourage you to go and read it.*
We all now know that targets and ceilings, such as limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, are easily missed. Measures imposing the necessary limits and ceilings to assure a minimum chance of survival for coming generations will not come from governments who are enmeshed in the technical-economic system that refuses to face the reality of the need not simply to institute a policy of low growth but rather a strategy of ungrowth. The pressure to do so can only come from civil society through grass-roots democracy. Looking around at the world today that's quite a tall order. In the past limits on consumption, the sharing out of scarcity, has mainly only been imposed in times of war and its aftermath, such as the system rationing during the Second World War and the decade that followed. However, the so-called "socialist" countries in the twentieth-century also used rationing as a means of distributing essentials. In the case of the Soviet bloc, such rationing was accompanied by widespread corruption and black marketeering. But rationing remains the only logical alternative by regulating by pricing. As the recent soaring petrol prices have shown, consumption may well be reduced as a consequence but the hardest hit are the poor. The wealthy continue to  consume and move about as they please. 
I lived in China for many years under a system of rationing. Buying cloth and clothes were controlled by a system of cloth coupons measured in inches and feet, and rice and wheat products by a system of grain coupons. There were also coupons for cooking oil and so on. Such rationing did not cause great suffering in itself, it was rather the paucity of diet that people suffered from.
Deng Xiaoping appealed to people's desire to consume after the grey times of the Cultural Revolution, and his words were readily lapped up by a population eager for variety and plenty. But we can see forty years later the environmental and health costs of such a society of mass consumption. And then, of course, where restrictions and limits are put in place in China they are not open to discussion, they are not arrived at democratically. But is this a good example? Is autocracy the only system that could impose the limits we need to save the planet?
A "New Human Culture" would look beyond the politics of greed and the economics of penury to the cultivation of individuals within a truly a democratic society. Indeed, mass education needs to be available to inform people's choices, but people also need an education that would equip future generations for fulfilment beyond and outside established patterns of consumption. What we need now is a retort to the old Bluesman B. B. King's classic lyric “I’ve got a good mind to give up living, And go shopping instead.” In order to avoid tomorrow's generation from feeling "they'd be better off dead", we must work towards a world where it is possible and desirable to "give up on shopping and go living instead."

* China Dreaming is available free on Apple books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/china-dreaming/id1046404801. A French eBook version of my text also exists as Sortie Treize in Nathalie Caritoux and Florent Villard (ed) Nouvelles psychogéographies . If you have difficulty accessing either please let me know and I'll make a copy available.

One of the principal missions of the anthropocenic venture has been the growing of food. For much of the past ten thousand years, agricultural activity, the cultivation of fields, did not cause catastrophic, irreversible damage on a large scale, although it did provide the economic basis for the emergence of socio-economic classes, and the accumulation of wealth and its concentration in the hands of a few. But, whether or not you take the view that the anthropocene starts with the Industrial Revolution, or the longer view that it begins with the advent of agriculture, we may agree that the overwhelming damage to the living world, the human and the nonhuman, dates back to the mass industrialization of agriculture, of what is now agribusiness. Only recently have we been experiencing the full effect, and then only a foretaste, of the impact of industrialization of the planet on our climate and on the production of food.
Food production, however, is not only hostage to the human-induced vagaries of the climate – such as too little water, or too much at the wrong time, it suffers from another industrialized practice which is the use of fertilizers that are derived from petroleum. Our ancestors would be stumped by the knowledge that modern agriculture is almost wholly dependent on petroleum-derived, non-organic fertilizers. Grain crops around the globe are now entirely depends on these chemicals. The rice in your bowl, the pasta on your plate, the bread in your hand for the vast majority of humanity is dependent on petroleum.
The current penury of petroleum and its derivatives has not only forced up prices for motorists and holiday-makers, it threatens to lead to starvation on a massive scale in the global South. The current crisis has exposed how the industrialization on a massive scale and the abandonment of hitherto conventional agricultural practices, especially in Asia, has left exposed new economic superpowers. It is the price to pay. Yet another impact of globalization on the twenty-first century world.
Should we be nostalgic for disappearing or already disappeared farming practices? Should we regret the "nightsoil" Asian framers spread on their crops? Should we retrospectively minimize the hard labour growing food has represented for many generations of peasants? Probably not, but that doesn't mean there were not other ways to meet the needs of humanity. I say needs rather than desires. And what I shall say next will underline that distinction.
Those in Europe who are now in their late 80s will still remember Second World War rationing. The rationing of meat and eggs and coffee and so on was detested, and yet despite black marketeering and corruption the system worked. It was a system incompatible with the consumer-driven economy we have all become used to. And yet, it is indeed what we need now. We need it to be sure that scarcity is spread more evenly, we need to prevent the over use of natural resources, we need to ultimately prevent starvation and to allow more food to remain where it is produced for local consumption. 
Rationing is part of the imposition of limits about which, following Jacques Ellul (1912-1914) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), I wrote about during the period of the coronavirus. "How can Ellul, Castoriadis and Rensi, together with Zhuangzi, whose philosophies proceed unwittingly in parallel like four ships in the night, help us to understand and imagine how we might retreat from, or even transcend, the cataclysmic moment that humanity is currently experiencing, a moment of which the coronavirus may be seen as a tragic epiphenomenon." 
You may remember that for a while the non-human living world had some respite. There was very little travel, the air was consequently cleaner, insects made a come back, birds were happier, and wild life in general flourished. But as soon as it was "safe to do so" we went back to our old habits with unconscionable abandon. I'll be writing more about the need for limits over the weeks to come. 

From an early age, I'd always had a halcyon vision of Palestine, alongside a sympathy for its people. My grandmother had spent some time there before World War One. Her mother was in a relationship with a Greek ship's carpenter from the isle of Kassos, and aged seventeen my grandmother had the privilege of accompanying them on a voyage to the Mediterranean. It was a cargo ship, and the ship's carpenter was on board to maintain and repair the ship's wooden parts. And that's how in my childhood I was regaled with stories of the Acropolis, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and camels spitting in her eye. She was there during the dying days of Ottoman dominance and several years before the British assumed their fateful mandate. She met a young man called Naim in Palestine and fell in love. He was about to emigrate to America and promised to write once he'd set himself up and invite her to join him. Some years later, having made good in Texas, he wrote asking my grandmother to make the trip. He'd done very well and boasted he'd acquired "three ranchos".  However, my grandmother, having returned from her adventure, had settled with her mother and siblings in the port of Liverpool where she met Chan Chin Lee with whom she would have five children and spend the next five decades.
The opportunity she'd missed to be with Naim was something she regretted until she died. It was nobody's fault. The 1910s were a time of international strife and chaos; the disorder and uncertainty brought about by the First World War turned everyone's lives upside down. 
The Greek ship's carpenter, Ellefteris Moschona,changed his name to Nicholas,  and settled in Liverpool with my great grandmother, who'd separated from her husband. With the scent of imminent war becoming stronger by the day and foreigners in an increasingly precarious position, he decided to demand naturalization as a British subject. It was granted just ten days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914. So, although her daughter's Palestinian romance was star-crossed, my great grandmother's own happiness was assured, at least for a time. Moschona died in 1926 at the age of fifty something from pneumonia leaving his English lover distraught. In his memory, her grandson born shortly afterwards was named Ellefteris Vassceloas, and thus went through life with an unpronounceable Greek name and a half-Chinese face. Even her Pekinese dogs were given Greek names: Calliope and Cosmos. So, that's the story of my boyhood Mediterranean imaginary... 
And yet, there's a little more. Recently, I was digging around in the family papers. Rejigging the jigsaw puzzle, it became apparent that things were not quite what they'd seemed. At the start of the year in which my grandmother was born, the mariner from Kasos had landed at Barry Dock, near Cardiff, and lodged with my great grandmother. My grandmother seemed never to have suspected Moschona was her father, it was never even hinted at. But now, in retrospect, that Mediterranean voyage seems less a young woman's romantic adventure, and more an unsung pilgrimage to the lands and waters of her ancestors.