Vexillophobia: You Can Wave Your Coloured Rag All You Wish Ms Dodsworth, But I'll Not Be Flying the Flag

Brooke Bond Tea Card Album: Flags & Emblems Of The World (1967) 

Dead dreams, dead dreams flying flags / Flapping in the breeze, wave your coloured rags [1]

 

I.

Surprisingly, the exact origin of flags - and the etymology of the word itself - is unknown, but peoples all over the world have been waving their coloured rags (as identifying symbols) for many thousands of years. 

The Roman legions, for example, loved their imperial standards topped with eagles and stamped with the letters SPQR, but they were by no means the first people to fly flags; in all likelihood this honour goes to the ancient Chinese and, during the medieval period, it was silk from China that allowed a number of other peoples, including the Arabs and the Norsemen, to design flags of their own. 

Just like the Muslims and Vikings, Christian Crusaders also loved to wave banners and flags and the English Cross of Saint George - red cross on white background (although originally the other way around) - dates to this period (12th century).

 

It wasn't until the late-18th and 19th centuries, however, that people - not just soldiers and sailors - began to collectively identify with nation states and their symbols, including flags. 

And today, thanks to Europeans colonising significant portions of the world and exporting ideas of nationhood, citizens in every country on earth who think of themselves as patriots have to have their own bit of cloth to run up the flagpole and salute. 

Indeed, there are now so many fucking flags that one has to be a professional vexillologist to keep up!

II.

As might be apparent by now, I'm no vexillophile. 

Although, funnily enough, back in the early '70s I was one of the children who used to like collecting those little illustrated cards - usually fifty in a series - that were given away with packets of Brooke Bond tea and apart from the one with British Butterflies (1963), my favourite was the set entitled Flags & Emblems of the World (1967).   

 

But that was a long time ago. And today, I hate flags; flag bearers; flag wavers; and flag lovers. Today, whilst I wouldn't use the term, I might best be described as a vexillophobe - that's certainly the word Laura Dodsworth chooses to use (and claims to have coined) ...

 

III. 

 

Writing in an article on her Substack, Ms Dodsworth extolls "our beautiful Union flags" [2], hanging on her local high street, as on so many local high streets at the moment, as part of Operation Raise the Colours; a 2025 campaign promoting the flying of the English flag (and Union Jack) in public places [3] and giving us all a wee taste of what it's like to live in Northern Ireland - no wonder I have a song by Stiff Little Fingers running through my head whenever I step outside! [4]

"Bright red, white and blue cut through the drizzle like fireworks", writes Dodsworth; and it's true sectarianism can be dazzling (just as fascism can be fascinating and awfully pretty to look at - all those colours and sexy symbols).  

The flags, says Dodsworth, are a reminder that she's at home - making me wonder if she's not a touch demented; does she really need such reminders to know her whereabouts?   

Anyway, for the record: I don't "recoil in horror at bunting" and nor do I "start to twitch at the sight of a fluttering Union Jack"; the sight of the St Georg's cross doesn't provoke "maximum fear and outrage". But, on the other hand, neither do I wet myself with joy and excitement at seeing the English flag raised above the local chippy [5].     

 

Vexillophobia, dear Laura, is not "a form contorted self-hatred" - it's actually a sign of intelligence and maturity. One can appreciate the aesthetic design of a flag - "the thrilling colours and elegant geometry" - without wrapping oneself up in the bloody thing, or learning to stand tall and salute.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the song 'Hard Times', by Public Image Ltd., on the album Happy? (Virgin Records, 1987): click here. The track, along with all seven others on the album, is credited to Dias, Edmonds, McGeoch, Lydon, and Smith. I don't like the song, but do appreciate the phrase 'wave your coloured rags'.  

 

[2] Laura Dodsworth, 'The Rise of Vexillophobia: fear of the flag is this nation's greatest malady', The Free Mind (31 August 2025): click here. The article is partly tongue in cheek, which is - for me at least - its saving grace.  

[3] The campaign began in August 2025 and involves tying flags to lamp-posts and painting the St. George's Cross onto mini-roundabouts, with the aim of promoting national pride and patriotism (and not of intimidating anyone or pissing off vexillophobes like me). The campaign has put me in a slightly strange position, as I despise both the people on the far-right who support it and the people on the far-left who oppose it (though I'm happy to accept that there are many supporters and opponents who don't belong to either political extreme).        

[4] The song I'm referring to is 'Fly the Flag' (written by SLF and Gordon Ogilvie) and found on the Stiff Little Fingers album Nobody's Heroes (Chrysalis Records, 1980): click here.  

[5] Push comes to shove, I suppose I'd rather see a British flag on top of the local town hall than, for example, the black flag of the Islamic State, the blue flag of the European Union, or the so-called pride flag of the LGBTQ+ community in all its rainbow-coloured garishness. But, ideally, I'd bin 'em all.  

Here We Are Nowhere (Bienvenue à l'Hôtel Non-Lieu)

The Overlook Hotel (The Shining, 1980) 

 

 

For a long time, I have dreamed of one day living in a hotel. Not staying for a short break or even a prolonged period, but living there full-time (and, indeed, dying beyond my means in a hotel just like Oscar Wilde) [1].

 

It isn't the amenities or services that attract per se, so much as the notion of anonymity and the fact that it provides an escape from domesticity and all the horrors of home, sweet home. The idea of not actually owning property also appeals. 

 

Since this is essentially a fantasy, concerns about the cost or feasibility - I know that many hotels have rules governing maximum duration of stay - haven't really entered my thinking. 

 

Nor have I worried about the fact that hotels can provide only a transient and somewhat artificial sense of community. In fact, that's part of the attraction; not belonging anywhere or having to establish long-lasting relationships with neighbours seems a plus to me and I imagine it would be far more fun interacting with a rotating cast of staff members, ghosts, and fellow guests. 

 

However, recently, I've begun to have my doubts and I'm not so sure that life in what the French anthropologist Marc Augé termed a non-place [2] is really such a great idea ... 

 

It's not that I fear being unable to sustain my identity, or that I might feel alienated and alone. Rather, my concern is that, ultimately, living in a hotel - no matter how fabulous - might begin to feel as if one were in limbo, neither here nor there, and once you tire of nowhere there is, of course, nowhere left to go [3] ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Oscar Wilde died on 30 November 1900 at L'Hôtel, 13 Rue des Beaux Arts, 75006 Paris, France, where, famously, he disliked the wallpaper. Readers interested in staying in what is now termed the Oscar Wilde Suite will find all they need to know by clicking here.    

 

[2] See Marc Augé, Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Éditions du Seuil, 1992); recently republished as Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, (Verso, 2023). 

      Augé coined the phrase non-place to refer to those spaces where traditional notions of history, identity, and human relations, are, if not erased exactly, then suspended. Examples of a non-place include a hotel room, an airport lounge, or a shopping mall. When you enter, you might immediately feel a sense of familiarity and yet they incite no sense of belonging. 

      Readers who would like to read the Introduction to the second edition of Non-Places can find it on the Verso blog page: click here.   

[3] I'm recalling here the line from the Stiff Little Fingers song 'Here We Are Nowhere', written by guitarist Henry Cluney, which can be found on their debut album Inflammable Material (Rough Trade, 1979) and listened to on YouTube by clicking here - 59 seconds of punk genius. 

Punk Xmas

'Tis the season to be Johnny 

(Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la)

I.

For all its professed anarcho-nihilism and counter-cultural posturing, punk quickly revealed itself to be all too human when the festive season rolled round, with many bands embracing the cynical-sentimental showbiz tradition of releasing Christmas songs. 

Now, whilst punk intellectuals such as Craig O'Hara and Gerfried Ambrosch* might think it terribly subversive for Stiff Little Fingers to release a raucous live rendition of White Christmas, or that by performing Silent Night at a million miles an hour the Dickies caused Franz Gruber to start spinning in his grave, I do not.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how hard you pogo around the Christmas tree, you're not reclaiming the happy holiday as a pagan tradition or deconstructing moral idealism, you are - in the words of Paul McCartney - simply having a wonderful Christmastime (ding-dong, ding-dong, ding). 

That doesn't make you a collaborator, or a sell out.

But it does mean you perhaps have rather more in common with everyone else than you might otherwise wish to acknowledge and that your romantic rebellion - against cliché, dreary convention, and commercialism - is born of the fact that you care a great deal (punk indifference being merely another pose).**

II.

So what, then, are the best punk Xmas songs?

That's hard to say, as, to be honest, they're all pretty awful, with one or two exceptions, such as Fairytale of New York (1987), by the Pogues, ft. Kirsty MacColl, and Merry Christmas (I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight) (1987), by the Ramones - though I'm not overly keen on either.

I do quite like Siouxsie and the Banshees' version of the traditional French Christmas carol Il est né, le divin Enfant (1982), but, ultimately, my tastes take me back towards the two tunes previously mentioned, by SLF and the Dickies: White Christmas (1980) and Silent Night (1978).

And finally, let's not forget the Thin Lizzy/Sex Pistols collaboration (as the Greedies); A Merry Jingle (1979): click here to watch their performance on Top of the Pops (20-12-79), or here, as they close the New Year's edition of The Kenny Everett Television Show, in another time and in a different world ... 

Notes

* Craig O'Hara, The Philosophy of Punk, (AK Press, revised 2nd edition, 2000); Gerfried Ambrosch, The Poetry of Punk, (Routledge, 2018).
 
** Obviously, when I say punks care, I don't mean about the baby Jesus, but about the authenticity of experience; they so want things to be meaningful and honest and real - including the joy of Christmas. 

To relive Christmas '77 with the Sex Pistols, see the BBC Four documentary directed by Julien Temple, (2013): click here.

Straw Dogs

Yulin Dog Meat Festival 

Image: Reuters / Kim Kyung-Hoon

I. Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs.

Until recently, if you said the words straw dogs to me I would think initially of the violent and disturbing 1971 film directed by Sam Peckinpah, starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George; secondly, I would think of the single by Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers, released in September 1979; and thirdly, of John Gray's critically acclaimed book of 2003, in which he attacks philosophical humanism. 

But having discovered that the origin of the phrase lies in the Tao Te Ching and refers to a ceremonial figure that is casually discarded after use, I tend to think firstly of the actual object and, secondly, of the Chinese indifference to the suffering of live animals, including the large number of dogs that are slaughtered for consumption each year at the Yulin Dog Meat Festival ...       

II. 玉林荔枝狗肉节 

The Yulin Dog Meat Festival is an annual celebration in which local residents and festival goers eat lychees and, more controversially, the flesh of thousands of unfortunate canines that are paraded in wooden crates and metal cages, before being skinned, cooked and eaten.

Whilst the practice of eating dog meat is an ancient one in China, the festival itself is a contemporary phenomenon, only beginning in 2009. Organisers insist that the animals are killed humanely and that eating dogs is no different to rearing other animals for food in terms of cruelty. Practitioners of traditional medicine, meanwhile, insist that chowing down on a pooch offers protection from the hot summer sun.   

Foreign animal rights activists are unconvinced by these arguments and each year they attempt to rescue as many dogs from the wok as possible. And, to be fair, millions of Chinese also support a total ban on the dog meat trade.

The Chinese government, however, whilst denying any official involvement in the festival, describes it as a local custom observed only by a very small number of citizens. They also point out that whilst westerners regard dogs as man's best friend, the Chinese legal system doesn't accord them specially protected status and they ask that their culinary preferences be respected.

No one ever said that cultural diversity was ever going to be easy to stomach ... 

Gotta Gettaway (Confessions of a Desperate Housewife)

Front cover to SLF single Gotta Gettaway 

(Rough Trade, 1979)

Although Daventry Road is far, far removed from Wisteria Lane - and although I'm certainly no Bree Van de Kamp - it appears that my Essex exile has resulted in my becoming a desperate housewife caught up in an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning and caring.

None of these activities are particularly objectionable in themselves, I suppose. And it's true that Lawrence was never happier than when baking bread or attending to the daily chores whilst Frieda lounged in bed smoking cigarettes and thinking of her lovers. 

But the domestic life isn't for everyone: even as a young child I despised carpets and comfortable chairs, potted plants and knick-knacks. I could see they were covered not only in layers of dust, but in falsehood. 

As I grew older, I realised that at the heart of every family home lies none of the humility and sweetness spoken of in the song, but secret hatred and unspoken disgust between the sexes and generations.

And this was why the Stiff Little Fingers single Gotta Gettaway (1979) struck such a powerful chord with me at the time and continues to resonate even now ...