I have an amazing winter coat that must be twenty years old. It dates from the time that I was in the Air Training Corps - between those difficult years of 16 and 17 when I was still thinking of joining the Royal Air Force. As the old army kit that we were supposed to wear for ‘field craft’ was never the right size, the cadets would swap kit whenever someone had a better size. The old kit was whatever we could find in the Army & Navy stores. I swapped a regular field jacket for this amazing piece of kit. A Norwegian friend at university told me that it was a bit of kit issued to the Norwegian forces (folk are - or were - conscripted at 18 and had to return for more training and exercises throughout their lives up to 55, I think) which perhaps explains the exceptional quality. The coat is stuffed with down feathers and has a fur-lined (I know, I know but the animal was dead already...) hood. It can easily cope with cold northern winds of a winter Scotland.However, in a moment of madness at university, I daubed a ‘Straight Edge’ motto on the back. Ostensibly, it was a celebration of the DIY ethic that underlies all good contemporary ‘garage’ punk (and we’re talking bands like Fugazi, Black Flag and the like and most definitely not MTV-style snot-lite Green Day, The Strokes et al. The motto: “Fuck Art Let’s Slam” made sense then but 14 years later is just a little embarrassing.
Being the sort of person who aspires to see opportunities in the negative things encountered in life, I decided to paint over the old motto and enhance the colours of the original image.
The snarling face/ sun pattern is based on an ancient Macedonian shield pattern. The Macedonians, under Alexander, gave the Persians a kicking that still affects Middle East politics to this day (in terms of it being an East vs. West thing) but at the time, there was a massive exchange of ideas and philosophy. On India’s western shores, for instance, there is a community of Jewish people who still practice the beliefs of their forebears who arrived with Alexander’s army more than two thousand years ago. The West discovered Buddhism - and Hinduism - for the first time (The Beatles, or rather George Harrison, were not the first) and also, crucially for modern mathematics and physics, the concept of zero. The arch, as deployed in stone bridges etc., was also brought back from Persia. In the interests of political stability in the newly conquered realm, Alexander also forced his officers to marry local women and settle in what was then a very foreign place. There was no ‘exit strategy’.
The motto itself is Dutch and is courtesy of Toon Tellegen’s stories about V.Swchrwm. Kristine and I began translating some of Tellegen’s stories over the New Year but one of my favourite’s remains the story of how the little boy, V.Swchrwm (don’t worry, the name makes no more sense in Dutch either) is spurned. The story, for me, is about turning something negative into a positive. As heartening as the message was, we wrote to Toon Tellegen to ask if we could translate his work and try and get it published in English and almost as an after-thought, Kristine changed V.Swchrwm’s words into the motto:
We will not be spurned.
