Welcome to the Exclusion Zone

Do you ever get the feeling that life in the last sixty years has been little more than a series of zone creations? Perhaps you don’t, but I do.

Like most words in the Western world, ‘zone’ comes from the Greek meaning a tract, area or belt. The Romans narrowed it down to mean a girdle, but afterwards middle English broadened it out again…until some time around the 1950s, the Americans used it as the universal collective noun for a region.

Since that era, every new bit of formative history has adopted it….to the point where it seems at times to be a banal noun. But usually, it is anything but: when something becomes a zone, it means things are going tits-up.

In the early 1960s, there was the intriguing Twilight Zone on the telly, but soon there was the all-too-real Demilitarised Zone (the Dee-Em-Zee) between North and South Vietnam. By the time I arrived in Lambeth in the mid 1970s, it had been declared a nuclear-free zone. Sadly, under Ted Knight it was also brain-free zone all the time – and a grit-free zone in the wintertime. Later – living as I did just around the corner from Railton Road – it turned into a war zone. Not long after that, it seemed that – overnight – the entirety of London became a No Parking Zone.

A long and pointless period of talking to shrinks began around this point, and the term comfort zone seemed to keep popping up. I also began a rapid period of promotion within a multinational ad agency, and so time zone calculations became a regular thing – in order to work out how knackered one might be on getting back home. I finally got to fly in Concorde, and had my first close-up view of the Ozone layer.

Shortly after I packed in going to the office and started doing different stuff, the eurozone was born. The internet showed early signs of losing its marbles, and not too long afterwards friendzones started up. I began reading about Buddhism, CBT, homoaeopathy – and so began a fascination with the oddities of the sub-atomic zone. And then just last night, I learned that Costa Rica is a blue zone country….because it has one of the highest citizen contentment scores in the world. Well I never.

Who knows what the next zone will be? Whatever it is, I’d wager it won’t be pleasant. There’s something doom-laden about zones, in that they tend to get added to a description when things are getting worse, weird, or completely out of hand.

Twilight was quite a nice (almost romantic) time until zone was added. Before the DMZ came along, something demilitarised was a good idea: suddenly, in this case, folks were fighting on either side of it. Nuclear free zones and No Parking zones sounded constructive, but were in reality early signs of London’s approaching dementia.That dementia has turned some Islamist and West Indian areas into a potential war zone. We used to have wars fought on battlefields: today, we have civilian war zones to mark just how profound our ignorance is of social anthropology.

On a more personal note, comfort zones were merely a recognition of the fact that much of modern life was mentally uncomfortable: one of these for me was constantly crossing time zones. And at the ultimately macro planetary level, big holes in the ozone layer were so worrying, not even James Delingpole was daft enough to suggest they don’t matter.

The eurozone needs no introduction. Suffice to say it will very probably wind up being the single biggest cause of global financial disaster. Much of me thinks ‘Bring it on’, but an awful lot of innocent people are going to suffer the consequences of Brussels, political, banker and geopolitical hubris…and I don’t want that: only fanatics want that.

Anyone who thinks friendzones are other than an awful symptom of the growing human desire to seek out all things unreal and unnatural needs help. The sub-atomic zone is fascinating alright, but it challenges the very reality of that same reality so many people are deserting in favour of the virtual. And no offence to Costa Rica, but if that’s a blue zone, I don’t want to think about what a red zone might be like.

However, if you were to ask me what the most telling and ironic zone of the twentieth century was, then I’d have to give the award to the Falklands War Exclusion Zone. The Falklands War for me was – along with the Dubya remake of the Iraq War – a key factor in my personal rethink. While I knew what a nasty, murderous tinpot dictator Galtieri was, it was impossible to miss that – in our hour of victory – Margaret Thatcher had finally left the Earthly Zone, and was now stationed three up from Barking. More to the point, against all the ‘rules’ of the Exclusion Zone, she sank a ship full of soldiers and got away with it.

It was the point at which I finally understood that, once you’re above the law, there is no limit to how easily you can evade it…and that there is nothing ruthless psychopaths won’t do to achieve their horribly twisted aims once they’re in this place. In truth, as we approach the end of 2014, the West’s control-freaks are in the Immunity Zone. The rest of us are in the Exclusion Zone.

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