Riding the Northern Line this morning, my eyes travel along the row of small rectangular ads, which are always to be found above the seats on the opposite sides of the underground carriages. Alongside bio-tablets for everlasting health and vitality, and online dotcoms offering match making and endless job opportunities, my eyes stop and open wider at the bold red lettering of this message; travel to a city you have probably never heard of.
“Think smarter not harder”, Tio Amaretto (or Uncle Scrooge as we liked to call him) always used to tell us when we were children. We, the young McDucks, would sit at his fluffy woolly-slippered feet which poked out from under the tartan blanket that lay over his legs. Uncle Scrooge sat in a large armchair like the ancient patriarch he was. He was old and his skin looked yellow, but he was a toughy, and he was always bright eyed inspecting us out of his wrinkled face, peering over his NHS prescription glasses. His stare would silence us. Then he would tell us fantastic stories of his past in the Wild West of America both north and south, of meetings on the frontiers with men who knew how to use six shooters and how to fight duels with long knives. Think smarter, he would say. It was all very new and exciting even if we didn’t understand what Uncle Scrooge was trying to tell us exactly.
“Heavenly heather!” Uncle Scrooge exclaimed to us once, “The genie in the magic lamp! The fortunes I own! I could have the world’s biggest diamond! No! The entire mining industry! Yes, yes, yes! I can see that this is going to take some careful
thought.” Because Uncle Scrooge had also become very rich, one thing having led to another. That is how it was those days when causal logic and analytic reasoning ruled the roost; one thing always led to another.
Yes indeed, and it all needed the hardest of hard, and most careful thought. Simply counting up the quantities Uncle Scrooge owned took up most of everybody’s time. “One multiplujillion, nine obsquatunatillion, six hundred and twenty three dollars
and sixty two cents!” his health service book-keeper told him another time when
we were with him. It was still those long off days before computers got quicker
at counting, and numbers like that seemed like an awful lot to us.
We were young, and we thought it was real, although his people always had to keep
counting over and over again so Uncle Scrooge was always waiting for that final final figure which would tell him how much he had got to spend keeping him well, and we thought it would last for ever. Of course those were the days before the Goatee Goats got even bigger than the McDucks (the Goatee Goats and all their branches, both the protean firm of Goatman-Sacks out west and the scary Goatam-ovich oligarch family in the east). For thirty years those Goatee Goats have hoovered up everything, causal logic and analytic reasoning having been taken over by their newer ontological categories and more exciting algorithms of hegemony, power and influence. Hoovered up everything… as everybody knows these days… until there was nothing left.
But even though Uncle Scrooge has grown even older still these last thirty years, and
his NHS joint replacement surgery and heart bypass operations notwithstanding, his eyes still sparkle from behind his (now thicker and thicker) NHS prescription lenses when we visit him in his social services state-funded old people’s home in north London. “Think smarter not harder!” he goes on telling us again and again, quack quacking his toothless gums together… now most of his NHS decayed teeth have also been taken away.
Travel to a city you have probably never heard of. Not London. No. It sounds like something Andrzej Stasiuk would tell us to do in one of his feuilleton literary travelogue pieces which win international prizes! And it is true: Poland-Travel, the ad sign says under this headline message which has stopped my roving eyes in their horizontal tracks today, City of Culture, 2016: the invitation is to travel east and south to join the carnival in the city which is called Wroclow, the state capital of that very part of southern Poland in which Andrzej coincidentally also lives.
The underground train is slowing down and it is my stop. Wroclow is not the only name the city has known during the last eighty years, I reflect as I gather my leather
bag off the carriage floor, sling the strap over my shoulder and make towards the exit. Vratislav and Breslau are two of its other names among several others by which it has also been known… It is not like London whose name one cannot think of ever changing however hard one tries.
Travel to a city you have probably never heard of. Hard to get your head round? Not if you are smart enough to actually live – and of course write from – there.