The Djinns of Charivari

The first edition of Punch was published on July 17, 1841. Its founders, wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and writer Henry Mayhew, got the idea for the magazine from a satirical French paper, Charivari (indeed, the first issue was subtitled, "The London Charivari").

The Closure of Punch magazine in 2002 led to a brief spite of soul-searching amongst britain's literates. The keyword being brief. People were briefly panicked that the magazine so redolent of Englishness, of English wit and humour and independent thinking was now dead from neglect.


That was before Chavs with plastic bracelets and velour tracksuits overran the country. There is no more soul-searching. Now all that you find at the newsagents are "What Camera", "Which Cistern" and "Bratty Kids" type of magazines for a nation suffering from attention deficit disorder. The clever writing and edgy editorials are left to the minority of leading Newspapers and their supplements. Which is what makes the arm-spraining Sunday newspapers worth the weight-lifting trouble.

I'm no Amerophile but I'd rather read American Vogue than the brainless British version (90% fashion and shopping as if culture and lifestyle were no longer a modish concern), or The Washingtonian rather than London magazine (which is 90% real estate and 10% faff with no thought-provoking articles).

Charivari implies discord, a cacophonous mockery. I used to be enamoured of this word back when I wrote poetry by the reams and I wrote one called the Djinns of Charivari. Little did I know how prophetic that was. We are living at their mercy today. They have ripped intelligent thought and culture to shreds. Imagination really is dead, and so is curiosity. You see the results of this on the buses-- the empty-eyed, embittered and uninterested. No one ever directed their attention to what the world has to offer, or taught them how to live or to know good from bad. They trudge from chav homes to chav locals and back, pausing to urinate on the local heritage.