Bockety

Bockety

/ˈbɒkɪti/

adjective

IRISH

unsteady; wobbly.

"the bockety wheelchair trundled off down the street"

I’m an 80’s kid. I was raised on the kind of television programmes where whatever was required -from a functioning rocket launcher to a bargain basement version of Tracy Island- could be cobbled together from items found lying around the house.

Chief amongst these shows, (MacGyver, Bitsa, Blue Peter etc), was the A Team. Every episode included the same montage set to an extended version of the familiar theme music- doong de doong doong, de de doong. Picture it if you can, fellow 70s and 80s children. The bad guys appear on the horizon. (You can tell they’re baddies by the kind of mustaches they’re sporting; every one of them looks like a Hispanic Tom Selleck). The A Team are trapped in a car garage/elementary school/shoe factory. They have no way out and a duty to protect both the beautiful permed women and her hard-done-by father. Face glances sceptically ‘round the room, noting the piles of useless junk and rusty cars; in my memory, the A Team were never more than six feet from a salvageable wreck. Face’s face -a concept easier to write than say- seems to be saying, “we’re really stuck this time lads.” (Cognisant of the fact that the A Team aired well before the watershed, Face’s face would not have dared say anything stronger).

There’s a brief pause; a silence, in which eight year old me can already hear the theme music beginning to swell. I’m not old enough to understand how tension or story structure work but some part of me instinctively knows that the entire episode -my whole week, even- will pivot around what happens next. George Peppard looks up. He grins knowingly at the camera; a slow, reptilian smile. He removes the log of a cigar which is perpetually clamped between his teeth. He nods, or perhaps even raises a hand slightly, though this may be my own embellishment because, in this moment Hannibal is, to me, a baton-wielding conductor or Mickey Mouse in Disney’s Fantasia, coaxing the magic out of everyday mops and buckets. Hannibal sees potential where no one else does. He glances at Murdock. Murdock may be howling mad, but Murdock gets Hannibal AND Murdock is a genius when it comes to wielding a blowtorch with intent. Doong de doong doong, de de doong the music kicks in. Shirt sleeves are shoved up to the elbow. High fives, dolled out liberally. Sparks are, quite literally, flying. This is a montage, 80s style. We could be watching anything from Top Gun to Aerosmith’s latest offering for MTV.

Ninety seconds later an armoured tank, a hovercraft or fully functioning helicopter emerges from the junk. The whole gang’s on board, even B.A. who’s notoriously reluctant to fly or trust any fool plan Murdock’s dreamt up. They emerge from the garage/school/factory shooting, flame-throwing and lobbing grenades like snowballs. The bad guys haven’t a hope of defeating their hastily assembled tank. Within three minutes they’re handcuffed in the back of a cop car. Face is having his ‘moment’ with the beautiful permed woman. And Hannibal? Well, Hannibal’s enjoying the rest of his cigar; pure loving it when a plan comes together.

Before Casualty sunk its teeth into me, Saturday evenings were always pre-Church bath, special tea, (something involving chips), and an episode of the A Team. Surprisingly, for a girl who’d go on to write magic realism, I had no interest in the fantastical. I didn’t enjoy cartoons or anything involving magical beings. Magic, (of both the Narnian and Paul Daniels variety), gave me the same kind of nauseous headache I got from listening to the Saturday evening football results. It still does. I watched the A Team because it was real and recognisable and inherently practical. I appreciated the way Hannibal and the guys were able to utilise whatever was closest to hand. It didn’t much matter that their creations were piecemeal, welded together with scrap metal and good intentions. They wouldn’t last long, but they were fit for immediate purpose. This made sense to me.

It resonated with what I knew about the world. Our family operated on the principles of make do, mend and share. It was a practical kind of creativity where food was divvied up between friends in need, meals were fashioned from whatever unlikely elements could be found in the ice box and clothes were handed down from neighbour to neighbour, cousin to cousin, so the youngest of us were often five or six years out of fashion wearing Global Hypercolour shirts which no longer changed colour and shiny knee’d cords. Fun was made, not bought. I once spent a blissful weekend living inside the cardboard box which had previously contained our new fridge. I remember eating fish fingers in there and drawing crayon designs on the walls in lieu of proper wallpaper. It was, if anything, better than a shop bought Wendy house, because I’d built it myself. I taped over old Sunday sermons with my own in-house radio shows. Why waste a new cassette when a used one could be so easily resurrected by pasting a piece of Sellotape over the tabs? We were brought up to use what we had and make the necessary adaptations.

Each year, just before Christmas, my brother and I would petition my father for a child-sized Rolls Royce, as found in Richard Blizzard’s Wonderful Wooden Toys.* We did not want Dad to buy us a wooden Rolls Royce. We wanted him to build one, A Team-style, utilising the contents of his woodshed. (Nb. My father did not have a woodshed, only a messy garage and a greenhouse missing several panels on account of our back garden being unofficial football pitch for the entire neighbourhood). Not only were we grossly over-estimating our father’s woodworking skills in demanding a car, we were also indulging in a kind of fantasy. What would my brother and I have done with a wooden Rolls Royce? We lived in suburban Ballymena, not 1930s Oxford. We would have looked like a pair of prize prunes driving it down to Ritchie’s and back for a packet of sweeties or an ice pop. We knew Dad would never actually build the Rolls Royce, but the possibility that he might was delicious. If such a magnificent thing could be created in our garage, next to the folded-up paddling pool and the big freezer mum kept for storing her baking, then what other wonders could be fashioned from the detritus of our everyday existence? This was what passed for alchemy in 1980s Northern Ireland. This was the making of me.

Years later I’d arrive at the Ulster Hall -a still-functioning Victorian concert hall in Belfast city centre- and realise that my childhood had given me a fine training for a career in community arts. The Ulster Hall is undoubtedly the greatest music venue in the world. It has, over the years, hosted a range of eclectic performances including Led Zeppelin’s first public airing of Stairway to Heaven, not one, but two, readings by Charles Dickens, boxing matches, orchestral concerts, political rallies and the annual St Patrick’s tea dance; the raucous, but much-loved highlight of our calendar year, which inevitably culminated in several hundred senior citizens forming a wild conga line around the grand hall.

During my six precious years on staff at the Hall I learnt how to position a golf umbrella overhead when it rained, ensuring the water dripping through my office roof, (previously the Gents’ toilets roof), did not make contact with my computer. I learnt how to remove a helium balloon from the ceiling of a four storey listed building using a long piece of string, a second helium balloon and a wad of duct tape, and how to placate a mob of angry old ladies with nothing but a packet of tea bags and a smile. I ran events for children and families on a budget of pennies and performed crafting wizardry, turning toilet roll tubes and scrap materials into everything from musical instruments to working models of the Titanic. I didn’t have to go on a training course to learn any of this. I’d seen enough episodes of the A Team and I’d certainly spent long enough being a Carson, to understand I wasn’t aiming for sleek perfection, I was simply trying to meet the needs in front of me with the resources to hand.

I wasn’t in the job long before I learnt that there was a word for how we functioned at the Ulster Hall. Bockety. It is an old Irish word, though I learnt it off a formidable Scotswoman and so pronounce it with a slight Scotch twang. Bockety meant held together with duct tape and good intention, (as much of the Ulster Hall was in those days). Bockety meant well-intentioned but looking a little wobbly round the edges. Bockety was not enough chairs or too many punters or the bar fridge taking a hissy fit mid-performance or having to wire the sound system yourself with nothing but YouTube for guidance, because the sound technician hadn’t turned up again. Bockety was sweating bullets and getting away with it by the skin of your teeth, and reconvening in the pub to laugh about it afterwards because, despite the difficulties, we always managed to deliver our events and the punters never seemed to notice the cracks. In short, bockety, was and, still is, why I love community arts work. It is a constant, grounding, reminder of my own limitations, my need to function as a team, reliant on other people; to be practical and creative in my solutions to the problems I face; to use the resources I have to hand.

I’m not for a second advocating for the under-resourcing of the arts sector. I will shout long and hard -most likely ‘til the day I die- in support of properly funded and resourced arts projects, organisations, venues and individual practitioners because I believe in both the enduring importance of art for art’s sake and the value of the arts in transforming lives and communities. However, over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the red tape, bureaucracy, box ticking, micro-managing and endless evaluating which makes it difficult to practice and deliver creativity in a timely, sensible and imaginative way. I know that the legislation is in place to ensure funding is distributed fairly and both practitioners and participants are safeguarded. But I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve felt compelled to adjust my artistic intentions or include elements in a project simply to meet the requirements of the funder. (I think most arts facilitators in Northern Ireland have had some similar experience of scrabbling around to locate the prerequisite number of Protestant, Catholic or otherwise “diverse” participants to meet a project’s quota).

I miss the days when community artists could respond quickly and practically to a need or opportunity without having to wade through time-consuming red tape. Mostly, I feel worn down by the systems we’ve become subject to. By the time I’ve filled in applications, wrote evaluations and posed for all the PR shots and interviews necessary to justify my project, the actual creative element seems more like a side show than the main event. I want to use my writing to engage with people in a spontaneous, instinctive and -dare I say it- immediate fashion. I want to have room to fail in these attempts, or at very least, not hit the target every time. In short, I should like to be a bit more bockety; which is to say, well-intentioned/doing my best/inherently human.

In In Other Worlds, her collection of essays on Science Fiction- Margaret Atwood writes. “Apocalypse means Revelation, the moment when all becomes clear, all is revealed.” These last few months, since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve heard the word apocalypse bandied about a lot. The world is imploding in chaos and panic. The end is nigh and we’re all doomed. I feel like I’ve been pitched back into the Hell, Fire and Damnation sermons of my Presbyterian childhood. Yikes! However, I keep coming back to Atwood’s idea of apocalyptic revelation. The American author David Dark recently explored a similar theme in an article for America magazine, (We Are Living in an Apocalypse, April 30th 2020). He writes, “in an apocalypse all manner of moral realization becomes possible.” Unarguably, Covid-19 has revealed the injustice, incompetence, greed and nepotism rife within society. Under pressure, our leaders and icons have revealed themselves for what they truly are, and the picture is rarely pretty. However, Dark goes on to discuss the lighter side of this current apocalypse; the slow revelation of the good which has always been present; the good we simply hadn’t taken the time to notice before.

Of course, goodness is apparent in the bravery and selflessness of our frontline workers, but it is also revealed in a hundred thousand smaller acts of kindness and generosity currently taking place across the globe. Foodbanks swamped with donations. Volunteers sewing face masks. Children writing letters to older people in isolation. Artists flooding the internet with free creative content. Those people on your street who’ve arranged a teddy bear’s picnic installation in their front yard. Your mother baking enough buns to feed everyone in a 2 km radius. Your friend from work who’s running a Zoom quiz to raise money for a hard hit charity. An apocalypse, as I see it, briefly turns the world off and on again. In the interim we are given a brief opportunity to glimpse who we most essentially are. All is revealed. Both the worst and best of us.

What’s emerging is bockety at best. Back at the beginning of April the English author, Melissa Harrison posted this wonderful observation on Twitter. "You know what I LOVE. Look at the lot of us, all in totally uncharted waters, none of us with the first idea what to do, but we’re TRYING. And we’re all throwing ideas on a big central pile and going ‘Does this help?’, ‘Anyone want this?’, ‘Here’s a thing I found!’” Never has there been a more timely nor accurate definition of bockety, nor a more heart-warming revelation of the good that’s coming to the surface right now. Covid-19 has forced us all back to our bockety roots. Nobody’s sleek these days. Even the television news is plagued with children and cats making their presence known during live patch-ins. Radio interviews are now conducted by phone, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, who’s found themselves attempting to sound polished and coherent whilst wearing pyjamas mid-afternoon. As the Lockdown progresses many of our favourite celebrities are starting to look a little more like us. Their beards are growing out too. Their roots could also do with a touch up. Their kitchens and living rooms look a lot like they’re camping out in their own homes too.

It's not just the supposed professionals who are looking decidedly more bockety these days. We’ve all gone a bit rough around the edges and maybe we’re better for it. We’re learning how to slow down, how to both make do and make the best of having to make do. We’re learning how to see the people around us as community rather than competition. Nobody’s winning right now. Everyone’s learning how to be ok just managing and how to ask for help when we can’t even manage ok. Every time I can’t be arsed to make dinner and eat cereal instead, every time I head back to bed for an emergency mid-morning nap, every time a Skype call friezes and I stare at my own pixelated face, knowing I am now addressing my readers or colleagues or workshop participants with the voice of a Dalek, a little bit of my perfectionism dies. This, for me, is no bad thing. I’ve long since needed a healthy dose of self-acceptance.

We are wobbly, but we’re coping and many of us are also attempting to reach out to others in their wobbliness. In this era, where everyone is experiencing a different kind of difficult, strength looks like muddling through our own versions of difficult and choosing not to criticise others because we simply can’t understand what they’re going through. Grace looks like expending whatever resources we have left to help others out. I have yet to witness a thoroughly sleek or flawless version of this. What I have seen is creativity in abundance, practicality, generosity and a great deal of humanity. I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’ve been more often moved to tears by the kindness than the suffering I’ve seen these last few months. Perhaps, I’d become conditioned to the bad stuff and allowed generosity of spirit to become the surprising exception.

People are meeting the needs in front of them with the resources to hand. They’re passing sourdough starters on to their neighbours. They’re posting artwork on their windows to cheer up passers-by. They’re phoning elderly friends to talk about nothing, because there’s nothing to talk about though it still helps to hear a familiar voice. They’re standing in Nursing home car parks singing and calling bingo for isolated residents. They’re producing plays and concerts in their spare rooms, ransacking their own cupboards for props. My friend Anne’s, writing 26 short stories about marine life to raise money for a hard-hit charity. My friend Rick’s broadcasting a nightly chatshow from his living room. My friend Hannah is recording old time tunes and posting them daily for older listeners to sing along. Are any of these projects Netflix-sleek? Hell no. They’re frequently pixelated and sometimes wonky but they’re still marvellous. And appreciated. You can, I think, see the humanity leaking through the cracks.

I’ve been writing Postcard Stories again; one a day for the last fifty three days. I’m mailing them to isolated people, using my one walk of the day to dander down to the postbox outside the bakery and send a little bit of imagination out into the world. I have over a hundred children signed up now. They’re from America, Africa, France, Scotland, England, Ireland, Switzerland and all sorts of other places. The children are making artwork in response to my stories. I post both the story and artwork each day on an Instagram site @JansPostcardStories. I am not a web designer. I do not know how to make it look professional so it looks a bit crap. I don’t know how to crop the edges of the kids’ images or automatically post updates to other social media sites. Everything is done painstakingly by hand with pen and paper, stamps and postcards graciously donated by followers, and lots of emails, (oh my goodness, you would not believe how many emails I’m sending these days). It is a bockety project but, so far, it’s created hundreds of tiny, joyful connections all across the globe.

There’s the woman in New Zealand who commissioned me to send a story to her elderly grandfather in a nursing home back in the UK. There’s the 86 year old woman who wrote to tell me her Postcard Story gave her the first giggle in six weeks of isolation. There’s Alan at the Post Office who sells me my stamps each week and always encourages me to keep going with the project. There’s the two proud little girls who’re having a brilliant Lockdown day because the BBC is featuring their artwork on its news website today. There are hundreds of encouraging emails between myself, (a woman, living alone for the last few months), and parents, (going up the walls trying to occupy small kids at home), and various grown up children, friends and relatives, (struggling to find ways to connect with the isolated people in their lives). There’s a video from a four year old in London painstakingly explaining every aspect of her drawing and another voicemail from a six year old in Oregon offering me some ideas to help my tired imagination. There are the two little boys, just up the road, who’ve been making their own version of Postcard Stories to keep in contact with their gran while she’s in hospital. There are the ten amazing professional artists who volunteered to illustrate the children’s stories. There’s a shelf on my bookcase filled with Postcards, artwork and letters from big and little people who understand that this project isn’t just about me helping other people, it’s also me, reminding myself that I need help too. I won’t get through this long loneliness without connection.

How would I ever begin to evaluate this project? It would never make it past the first round of a funding application. So many small, seemingly insignificant connections. No targets. No specific demographic. No commitment to excellence. No way of measuring whether it’s worked or failed. It’s just a bunch of people, “all in totally uncharted waters, none of us with the first idea what to do, but we’re TRYING. And we’re all throwing ideas on a big central pile and going ‘Does this help?’, ‘Anyone want this?’” And it turns out some people do. I’ve not had a single negative comment since Postcard Stories kicked off, (and let me tell you, I am no stranger to the negative Twitter comment or the wee Facebook aside which just rips the guts out of my day). People understand that what I’m doing isn’t perfect -and dear goodness, I hope they understand I am capable of writing slightly more nuanced and complex stories- but for now, it’s what’s needed and that is enough.

As we begin to slowly contemplate a return to whatever comes next -normal, new-normal, or some kind of brave new world- I’m not saying we lower our standards and call any old nonsense art. I’ve always believed that community art should not be some kind of excuse for lowest common denominator creativity. Let’s continue to strive for excellence in what we do. But perhaps we might consider what’s been learnt during this apocalypse. There’s a need to re-embrace grassroots practicality and resourcefulness in our approach to community arts. There’s the challenge of maintaining resilience, whilst remaining flexible enough to meet the needs and opportunities of the moment. And above all else the need to be continually reminded, as we have been these last few months, that community art begins and ends with community, which is to say people. And people are not sleek, perfectly functioning entities. People are complex and broken, flawed and frequently amazing. They won’t always fit neatly into an evaluation form. They won’t necessarily provide the PR angle we’re after. They may not meet the expectations of our project and yet will find some unique, un-assessable way to render their experience of it, life-changing. People are, in short, bockety creatures.

If Covid-19 has taught me anything, it is that I am, at heart, a bockety artist. I’m going to continue to keep chipping away at my craft, constantly learning and trying to be the best writer I can be. I fantasise about being the sort of writer who holds her silence well and only says profound things and wears block coloured tailored suits in a variety of soft grey and taupe shades. But I know this isn’t me. I’ll always write too much. And I’ll need to write a lot of shite before I get to the good stuff. And I’ll always jump into too many projects, and every couple of months, feel like the wheels are beginning to come off and the bockety-ness is out of control. I will always be more comfortable in the world of cardboard box creations, duct taped solutions and stories scribbled on the back of second-hand postcards. I can’t help it. I watched too much of the A Team when I was young. And I like people. I like being reminded that I can’t function without all these messy, beautiful connections. And I think I’m done with apologising for this.

*Since writing this piece it has transpired that my friend, having been family friends with Richard Blizzard, is one of the children photographed with the wooden toys in Wonderful Wooden Toys, (sadly not the wooden Rolls Royce). This is akin to celebrity in our family.