Hilary Fannin: The political talk around my table isn’t always palatable

I remember being 18 in 1980. I remember the bite of the rain, and the wind whistling through the holes in the economy, and the empty spaces where friends used to stand before they chugged out of Dublin Port on a belching ferry, a packet of Bovril sandwiches in one pocket and 10 Major in the other, ne’er to return (bar for their greying parents’ golden jubilee or to bury the cat).

All right, maybe that’s a tad sepia; the sandwiches could have been cheddar cheese and Branston pickle, and the departing friends may have been smoking Consulate, but you get the picture.

I remember, from those oops-the- electricity’s-been-cut-off-again days, the meat mountains and milk lakes, and queueing up for rent allowance and the surprise excitement of waking up to a little package of European Union beef on your doorstep one rainy morning, even if you weren’t terribly sure how to cook it.

I don't remember who I voted for when, at that tender age, I was first admitted to the polling-booth club, but I'm pretty sure that I wasn't scratching the parchment with my quill to perpetuate the system. Or, at least, I'm sure I thought I wasn't voting to perpetuate the system.

Kitchen-table politics

Political engagement, or the lack of it, seems to be a hot topic at the moment. All you Newsnight aficionados out there will have seen the programme initiate a desultory romp around selected British kitchens in the run-up to the UK general election, to ascertain, by way of sitting various households down around their tables and making them talk politics, the boiling point of the nation.

“Why read about politics when I can read about Katie Price’s boob reduction?” was one dully familiar refrain emanating from the telly, expressive of an outlook that, unlike Price’s décolletage, is entirely resistant to change.

The political discourse around my own table isn’t always palatable either. Conversation and debate about inequality, cultural disconnectedness, prejudice, bigotry, debt, inhumanity, war, oppression, poverty, greed and all the other blind ghosts that have been cowering in Pandora’s lousy old box, are hitting off the walls of my kitchen these days, rattling the window panes and making a holy show of the teacups.

And maybe I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed, speechless even, stunted and inarticulate and flooded with something near panic, when I try to respond to youthful questions about debt in perpetuity and the shattered environment and global injustice and why I’ve apparently spent a voting lifetime perpetuating a broken system. (But, goes my paltry defence, I thought they had the capacity to change things.)

I conducted my own utterly unscientific straw poll with a bunch of 18-year-olds this week, young people who will have their first opportunity to express their democratic right to vote in the upcoming marriage-equality referendum.

“Do you think gay people should have a right to marry?” I asked.

It's free will, isn't it, they all agreed, and what right has anyone to tell someone that they can't marry?

“So will you vote for the amendment?”

Of course, was their collective reply.

I'm interested, too, in how today's 18-year-olds receive and respond to political information, their sources and channels of communication so different and incomparably more diversified than in 1980. In general, they seem a hell of a lot better-informed than I was (as well as having better teeth and not being given to weeping over their Hotel California LP).

Vlog velocity

I watched a couple of Russell Brand's video-blogs recently ("vlogs" actually), and the sheer velocity of his rhetoric in his Trews ("true news") pieces made for entertaining viewing. I staggered away from the screen afterwards feeling quite buoyed up – for a while – at the prospect of a populist revolution.

“If there was something worth voting for, I’d vote for it,” said the non-voting Brand at one point, which rather took the gloss off his words, a sentiment I found as well-worn and unappealing as his leather trousers. Whether his energetic, engaged and often eloquent enterprise ultimately evaporates into a takeaway cup of Buddhist Lite abandoned down some loquacious consciousness raising laneway remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, in a more homespun way, the news that a local school was having a cake sale for gay marriage cheered me up no end. Change is possible, I thought, even if, in your antediluvian ignorance, you assumed a vlog was an item of footwear for a heavily adenoidal Dutchman.