TAKING LEAVE OF MY CENSUS

“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

Strangely that quote from Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs” is pretty much the only quote I can think of with regards to censuses (censi??) when I put my mind to it because, generally speaking, these things are not the kinds of things that excite the great dramatists (or the hack screenwriters) of the age*. Facts and figures, sums and statistics do not thrill us in quite the same way as a great big helicopter gunship chasing a taxi in a Bruce Willis movie might.

A pile of purple paperwork

The census forms arrived this week. Is it ten years already since I popped that envelope through the slot outside the old sorting office on my way to wherever? Ten years that I’ve somehow survived, but sadly not the sorting office itself which has been sacrificed upon the altar of corporate restructuring in the interests of an efficiency that has yet to actually materialise for its customer base. It was all probably relocated due to information provided in that very same census, but there you go. Maybe all those millions of extra envelopes churning through the system this time around will breathe some life into the faltering corpse of our national mail carrier for a few more months, but I doubt it. Already we have the option to fill in the forms online for those who now find a biro either too dull or just simply not gadgety enough for their tastes. The writing is no longer on the wall, my friends, but the keyboards are tapping away and another cornerstone of our mutual pasts is about to tumble into the abyss of history. The shiny red pillar-boxes (one of which, I remember becoming particularly iconic as it stood amidst the debris after that huge bomb went off in Manchester in 1996) that punctuated all our lives may soon be gone forever, only to pop up in old re-runs for mad old uncles to point out and hopefully ask the room if they remember them, sadly to just receive the usual angry silences in return.

Meanwhile, the doorstop of questions making up the latest census form still sits there awaiting completion. The problem is that I truly, truly loathe and detest filling in forms of any kind. It always seems such a chore, a chore now compounded by my mother telling me that she feels unable to fill in her own census form and so I’ll have to do it for her, immediately doubling my fun factor. Then, of course, there is that slightly sinister caveat, that it is against the law not to fill it in (what happens if I spoil my ballot, miss…?) with the mild suggestion that if you don’t fill it in you will be taken outside and shot (that is, presumably if they can find me if I never filled in the form…) although, obviously, we don’t live in that kind of country with that sort of regime. Not yet, anyway, although “taken outside and given a stern talking to” doesn’t have quite the same dramatic edge.

I know that I shouldn’t be so resistant to the blessed thing. I know that all the information is terrifically useful for a little while to tell the PTB (“Powers That Be” or the Boo! Hiss! brigade…) where the people are (or were on that day at least…) and what services they can cut next, but after that, it really doesn’t seem to tell you very much about what the people are like. But then, it probably isn’t really supposed to, that’s not its function or purpose. Never-the-less, to a certain extent, you could probably learn more about what the British people ten years into this new millennium are really like by looking at what we read and what we watch on television, which is, incidentally, what’s most likely to get us voting in our millions. None of this, I fear, would give you the best opinion of the great mass of the GBP (“Great British Public” or the Eeeek! brigade…) or paint us in the best of lights. Once all the data is extracted and implemented and all those libraries, schools, parks and pools closed down because there is no perceived need for them, the data probably lurks around for a while in big boxes marked “secret” which will no doubt then be left in a taxi somewhere, before finally being released into the big wide world so we can all work out that we’re probably not related to royalty in even the smallest of ways.

The problem I have with the census is that it tells you everything, yet at the same time it tells you nothing about the actual person. It is much the same problem as the one I have with all this researching into family history that’s going on nowadays. I don’t really care whether I’m a distant great cousin six times removed of Barry Manilow or whoever, nor does a list of old names of people I never knew and which house they might have once lived in (assuming, of course, that I’ve found the right one…) mean much to me. Mind you, being a nobody who comes (as I do) from a long line of nobodies, maybe I would say that, wouldn’t I? All these facts and figures don’t tell me the important stuff, the emotional stuff, the human story behind the cold, hard, dusty facts; Were they kind? Did they like good beer or fine arts? What sort of music did they enjoy? What was their philosophy on life? So much about what makes a person tick and makes them who they are and the person their friends and lovers knew that a register or a gravestone bearing just a name can never even begin to tell you.

Last time around the paperwork seemed to be plastered all over with the date that the census was to be taken, but nowadays they seem to whisper the date by burying it deep within the paperwork so I’ll probably forget to fill the wretched thing in and risk the kick of the jackboot coming through my front door a short time later.

I’d better put it in my diary.

At least, I suppose, we no longer have to travel across country to the place of our birth to do a census. Not like in the times of that other famous story that includes references to a census, the tale of the birth of the baby Jesus that was so often told in my youth and which still gets a nod in this household during the annual “Carols from Kings” (and presumably in lots of other places to, of course, but not within my earshot…), although a cross country trek to the place of my birth is only a short bus ride away. Or well, it would be, if they hadn’t cut the bus service at some point following the last census. “No call for it” they cried, as the few sodden regulars started their daily trudge to work instead.

Hannibal Lecter and Jesus Christ. Not two names you’d normally generally expect to find rubbing shoulders in the same few paragraphs, I’d have thought. Ah well, old Greater Blogfordshire’s an eclectic kind of a place, although it’s unlikely to appear on any census forms any time soon. “Surely not?” did I hear you utter…? “Is Lesser Blogfordshire not a vital part of this great realm of ours? Is it not as we thought, a bustling hub but instead, mayhap, a fictional construct…?” Now, that would be telling of course, but if you look very carefully at your maps you might find it tucked snugly in between Weatherfield and Borsetshire, and nowhere near Walford or Hardy’s Wessex of course, because they’re too far south. It does depend on the age of the maps of course, as before the redrawing of the county lines back in the unromantic and harsh concrete-minded days of the 1970s, we were all living quite happily in the county of Nomdeplume and things seemed much simpler back then, even if it does confuse the historical researchers when they’re trying to dig up their ancestors hereabouts.


* 'Interestingly' after posting this I found an Aaron Sorkin quote that went: "Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word "census," and people fall asleep."