James Meek

15 March 2003. In the evening I unwrap my gas mask, try it on, tighten the straps, take out the filter cartridge, check it’s not cracked. I unseal the NBC suit – short for ‘nuclear, biological, chemical’. I have a flak jacket and a helmet. I lay it all out on the horrible turquoise bedspread in the Radisson hotel room. Seldom can so many have gone from such odious luxury so quickly into war against such a poor country with so little provocation. I unpack and repack the medical kits. There is some good stuff in there, and a remarkable number of ways to treat diarrhoea.

Between its towns and cities, the rumpled skin of lowland Britain is covered and pierced in many ways, by church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so much else has changed?

People who live in cities assume their city is a thing in the way they talk about it. They ‘hate’ London, they ‘adore’ Belfast. We don’t speak of the railways as a whole in that way even though we move in and out of the railways constantly, and spend hours – years – of our lives there. The railways may, as Simon Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a separate domain ... ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’ or ‘I hate the railways.’

The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be. It is they, the social category previously labelled ‘poor’, who are accused of living in big houses, wallowing in luxury and not needing to work, while those previously considered rich are redesignated as the ones who work terribly hard for fair reward or less, forced to support this new category of poor-who-are-considered-rich.