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Diversion and Digression

The Naming of Regenerative Parts

—Captain Nemesis

Naming is important, Nemesis believes. A tad difficult to know what it’s all about if you lack a decent name with which to grab the it-ness of it. The Mother of Nemesis, for example, possesses a fine hound of mixed disposition and when asked about it says, ‘that’s Nobby, a Lollopingfollolloper, don’t mind him doing that - he enjoys it’, which expresses all there is to know exactly. By contrast, your average Canine Galtonite will tell you that the Lowland Snoopelhaunch is called Champion Amenhotep Howitzer Harfleur II, which tells a person absolutely nothing. I mean, says the Mother of Nemesis in a manner that does not invite dialogue, what kind of person stands in the middle of the park yelling ‘Champion Amenhotep Howitzer Harfleur II’ at something off-brown trying to conjugate a litter bin?

How can a person go into society unless equipped with a full bandolier of monikers? You need your pornstar name (name of first pet + mother’s maiden name). A young man orbiting Planet Nemesis is duly called Sapphire Sidebotham, which is marvellous. And mention of heavenly bodies of all sorts implies Star Trek name (name of first car owned + last pharmaceutical taken), which morphs intergalactic Nemesis into Viva Atorvastatin – how much more stellar can you get? And of course you cannot be without your West Indian fast bowler name (name of US President when you were born + last seaside town visited). For example, Eisenhower Hythe which, as Ma Larkin said, is jus’ perfick.

And we will all need a regenerated name (name of the street you lived in 25 years ago + the last island you visited) which translates Nemesis into Saltram Samos (though it could have been Clova Canvey).

Beyond a regenerated name, though, regeneration in point of fact may not exist (unlike Nobby, who does, and the proof is in the dry cleaning). The part named ‘regeneration’ is a label for doing things in a place which was in the swim and is no longer. For example, in Britonland, regeneration is much associated with loss of industry along rivers and their estuaries: Clyde, Tyne, Tees, Avon, Thames, Humber. Regeneration will restore swimming, is the general legerdemain. But rationales move on, and proximity to a river estuary is not at the heart of the knowledge economy de nos jours. A pretty backdrop, perchance, but not a magnet for moolah making. So regeneration must have a new rationale, not just a palimpsest of freshly minted two-bedroom flats.

Four big (that’s biiiiig) (not smaaaall) technology adoptions of the last fifty years – containerisation, control systems technologies applied to manufacturing processes, screen-based dealing, the Internet/office ICT – have radically altered what business is where, doing what, employing whom. In London, financial and business services occupy a dominant position as manufacturing did 50 years ago. Blue and white collar work continues to be automated. According to the State of the Cities report, kindly provided by the no-longer Uffizi of the Concupiscent Dome Panicker, the three English regions comprising the greater SE (GSE) have been diverging economically from the rest for thirty years, proportionately attracting more export business and depending less on public sector activity. Much of the GSE’s economic life would be better described as part of a global network of activity than as ‘UK economy’, because that’s how its interdependencies operate. The exceptional bit is the Thames Gateway…

In the Teahouse of the Hardest Moan, poring over a discarded copy of Quantas Physics (like quantum physics, only with backpackers), Nemesis-Ma reads that adoption of technology keeps changing things. Everything moves about – houses, businesses, families, communities, vegetation... If CCTV could cram a couple of centuries of the Isle of Dogs into half an hour of footage, this would be clear beyond peradventure (peradventure is just past Foot’s Cray).

Nemesis affirmatively points out that he once attended a Greek Cypriot wedding in Eminland. No-one had thought to inform him that it was the crustimony proseedcake to pin folding wonga to the bride’s dress. So in a fit of inspired modernity, he pinned a cheque to her gorgeous raiment, an act which occasioned mirth rather than admiration. And if we pursue the theme of innovation, surely by now chip and pin bridal gowns should be all the rage? Or better, simply waving your Oystercard over the bride’s embonpoint should instantly render her a monkey to the better. We have got to wise up to the cashless society and get into knowledge economy attire.

And so it is with places named for regeneration. Estuarine industrial places gone to bolt (like seed, but rustier) need a new fortune and the cookie will inevitably say: to get back into the main flow of things get some fresh innovation recipes, whip up a soup of new ideas (chuck in a few eBay leaves for flavour!), ladle out a few new technologies and see whether people swallow them, and so forth. The alternative, as Nemesis-Ma remarks, is to put yer teeth in and go up town.

Erith and Rainham, for example, are pleasant old villages encrusted with all that industrial revolution and town and country planning could throw at them. Mmm, interjects Corian d’Ergh, Modern Experience Correspondent of Winsome News, as one enters Rainham one suddenly tastes the exquisite combination of scrapyard and perhaps the UK’s most ugly Tesco store layered on a wafer of indifference which makes the gullet do things that the palate should have foreseen. Meanwhile Erith isn’t twinned, allegedly, but has a suicide pact with Dagenham.

They aren’t going to turn respectively into the Juin Les Pins and St Tropez of the Thames Gateway just because some highly trained urban fantasist writes it into The Plan. There has to be a logic to it, a sense that the new label is attached to what can be a new product and isn’t merely another re-garlanding of reality with delusions of advanced manufacturing, Brigitte Bardot or the fine wines of Chateau Aithirtine. That isn’t to say radical transformations cannot take place. Our CCTV camera on the Ile de Chiens records such a story. But just as containerisation and control systems cut while big dealing rooms full of internet-linked screens pasted, there will be a technology adoption logic to it somewhere. Look out for RFI dots – the Government’s way of enabling your new passport to give your identity away and the basis of a revolution in retail employment coming soon.

Captain Nemesis rules the waves of innovation

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