Ideas, ideology and the future
A day in the mind of Fred Z, NI subscriber and optimist. David Ransom tries to sketch Fred's profile.

The other wall
Fred gets his copy of the NI. Eduardo Galeano shouts over the wall that divides South from North.

Electron orbits dandelion
A course on 'new technology'. Peter Stalker conducts a therapy group for people like Fred who are dazzled by modern science.

The philanthropist
Lunchbreak, and Fred has a revelation about work! Sheila Rowbotham tells the story.

The Little Red Province
What is Fred to teach his pupils about the 'New Europe'? Curt Stauss peers through the smog and gives an insider's view of the 'revolution' in an East German industrial town.

WHAT NEXT? - THE FACTS

Bargain! Free time sale!
Home and recreation. Geoff Mulgan and Ken Worpole walk down the global shopping mall while Fred paints the ceiling.

Simply - Utopia

Decent demons
Safe sex is one thing, no sex quite another. Anuradha Vittachi watches Fred grapple with green-eyed monsters.

Fred Z, this is your dream!
Fred has his say and makes a spirited bid for freedom.

It was a Tuesday afternoon last summer. I was a nervous wreck. By Wednesday afternoon I'd have to present my proposal for an issue of the NI on ideology. That meant ideas, and I didn't have any. Not a single one.

I'd just been to a conference on 'Utopia' in London to mark the centenary of the publication of William Morris' News from Nowhere. We dreamt our way through workshops on the history of dreaming and convened for the final plenary. It began with a long debate about whether one of the speakers, Tony Benn, should put out the pipe he was smoking (he won the argument, I think, but he put out his pipe anyway). It ended with a minstrel singing rousing songs from the platform while from the back of the hall came shouts from the caretaker: 'You're way past your time! I want to get home for my tea! Everybody out!'

Wherever I turned I came up against what you might call Anglo-Saxon 'Dirty Realism', the same anti-intellectual scorn for ideas. What are they? Where do they come from'? Do they matter? Hard to say, if you haven't got any. And, that Tuesday afternoon, I hadn't.

I decided to stay calm, to employ what we members of the amateur thinking trade call the 'Don't Panic Tactic'. What I needed was someone sufficiently unlike me to take the blame if my magazine went wrong, but sufficiently like me for me to take the credit if it went right. I found Fred Z.

Or rather, he found me. He sprang out of my imagination - offering me himself, a day in his mind, as a device for looking at ideas and ideology.

Before I could stop him he'd set about breaking all the few rules we have for this magazine. He put the end of the world at the beginning, grabbed the 'Keynote' for himself and put it at the end, and placed the future firmly in the middle. He went to a remote Greek island to have his portrait painted by Korky Paul. He got photographs taken of NI staff members holding Tarot cards against pieces of garden furniture. He had designers cutting up precious jewels of text as if they were bits of spaghetti. He showed flagrant disregard for my budget. And he had me tied to a fax machine for days on end (will the Mayor of Lauchhammer please plug in his machine at his earliest convenience?!). Never was editorial control more comprehensively lost.

And now he's had the nerve to ask me to give you a message. He won't leave me alone even here, the last outpost of my editorial prerogative. Oh well, in for a penny ...

He says, would you please try to read his magazine from start to finish, in that order, you know, beginning at the beginning and ending at the end, that sort of thing. I tell him you never do that, He says you might enjoy it more if you did.

You see, he has this quaint notion that it's a story: that it shows how her/history goes on, just like life, whatever anyone might try to tell us to the contrary about it coming to an end.

Well, I'm afraid that in one sense, Fred, it does. I've now got to take my leave of you. I have my own life to lead too, you know! I shall miss you, and Beth, Alice, Henry, all the other shadowy figures in your life who have been my constant companions for the past few months. You dug me out of a bit of a hole. It's been great fun.

Letters
Letter from La Paz
Update
Endpiece by Moiphebi Nkuebe
Reviews: including Eduard Dowes Dekkar classic
Country profile: Jamaica

COVER AND FRED CARTOONS BY Korky Paul
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER