Chocolate, Alcohol and Skimpy Swimwear
A tale where snacking and swimwear may prove a distraction…
As I mentioned I had joined an arts group in Dundee. It had the clever name of Dundee Artists in Residence – the acronym working out to D-AiR. We’re artists – we can do anything – is a phrase I often use. Daring to do stuff is part of the deal – daring to be ourselves – daring to do stuff others won’t try – daring to say things others won’t say.
The arts group had arranged a swim in the River Tay at Broughty Ferry, a posh suburb of Dundee. We were hosted by ‘Ye Ancient Amphibians Society’ and met at the harbour. There is a little building there with toilets and small changing rooms. It was June, but as each of us emerged ready to take to the water, we displayed multiple layers of swimwear and wetsuits. All that is except Doug. A cheer went up as he strode out in just a tiny pair of pink Speedos. Someone had a camera and we gathered for a group photo. Doug was at the front, striking a series of body-building poses.
The tide was low, so it meant a long climb down a metal ladder bolted to the side of the harbour wall. But at last, in the water, we just bobbed around and chatted. I spotted someone I knew and swam over to her. She had so many layers of wetsuit it was like she had become an inflatable dinghy.
A proper sandy beach starts from Broughty Ferry and continues North and East for many miles on the North side of the Tay Estuary. After our swim we headed there. Sand was blowing in a stiff breeze, but someone had brought a tent. I gratefully clambered inside, along with four or five others. It’s a bit of a squash, but luckily I had some resources in the form of a flask of hot chocolate and a large bar of fruit and nut. I explained to the others that fruit and nut chocolate counts towards one’s five a day. I shared out the goodies and everyone seems contented.
Outside, meanwhile, more hardy souls had built a bonfire. As the sun went down and the wind dropped, we all enjoyed some simple food and drinks around the fire.
Days such as these are memorable days. Nothing much happens perhaps but nonetheless there is a lot of satisfaction in time spent with friends, food, drink and some fun activities. Many utopias of the past took this theme – simple pleasures. It’s a good idea for a utopia, provided we don’t stop to ask where the food and drink comes from, who makes the clothes and the tents, how did we light the bonfire, and so on. The other thing to notice is the general benevolence of people. Perhaps the theory goes – given enough food, drink and entertainment and people won’t have any reason to fight each other. It’s a very optimistic view of human nature!
Some modern utopias still play on these themes. There’s a bright future, it is claimed, that can be brought about by technology. Other utopias hark back to a lost Arcadia (an Arcadia that never really existed). This is a world of small villages, simple agriculture and none but the most basic technologies. Sometimes such simple worlds are offered as a response to climate change.
Whether you consider any such utopias to be desirable, they all face a couple of challenges if they were ever to be put into practice. The first thing is that the world is always changing, so any utopia offered to us must be able to accommodate changing circumstances. The other thing to say is that we humans take a bit of organising! As I’ve said, the benevolence of people, and indeed good relationships at all levels of society, are things that many utopian stories either assume or ignore. But this seems critical. We are political animals, so there needs to be some effective system of governance to go along with all the promises of the bright future a utopia might offer. The governance system in fact is going to be the thing that addresses the issue of change that I mentioned earlier. So we might say that a large part of resilience comes from good governance.
What might a utopian governance system be like? I can only say that there are a few basic things that we seek as humans. Amongst these are fairness, equality, freedom and justice. And to be genuinely utopian we should add the opportunity for human flourishing in the mix – the opportunity for each person to reach their full potential. This is a bit like the ‘dare’ in our artists’ group with which I started – to be able to be ourselves, speak our minds and express our gifts and talents as people is a big part of human flourishing. I admit though that these are all rather abstract aims. There needs to be some very pragmatic decisions made by a society in order to balance out the idealism of a utopian vision with its mission of achieving fairness, equality, freedom, justice and flourishing.
What if all this could be achieved? Then, at last, we could settle back into those happy days of friends and family, recreation, food and drink, shared conversations, art, music, literature – in short, all the things, both simple and profound, that raise our lives above the level of mere survival. It’s a strange feature of utopias that they often bring together the deeply personal – body, food, family, friends, pleasure – with the really big questions of politics and economics.
Should we dare then to dream? Utopian dreams are often despised these days. But if we are not aiming for utopia then what exactly is it that society and culture are aiming at? A reasonable level of mediocrity? A chance to do our own thing as individuals? Efficiency? Safety? These seem like lesser dreams to me and unworthy of us. Let’s dream big again! Let’s dream of utopia!
