One Saturday lunchtime last October I went to the Suffolk Arts Club. Because that’s what I’m like. Because that’s what I do.
There was an art event going on in the tower, right up at the top in a little wooden cell you have to climb up into, literally, swinging on wooden hand-holds if you didn’t want to fall to what would very likely be your death on the concrete floor twenty feet below. Someone asked me if I was going to go and contribute something and I got it in my head that art meant painting and painting meant poster paints and probably because it was at the seaside I thought of blue paint, the childhood deep blue of the sea, the blue of the sky back then.
It was October though and the wind was gusting and the sky was grey. I was half-way coming out of a massively upsetting time of my life and trying to learn not to force my pre-conceptions onto events and people. When I swung up into the wooden tower there were no paints. But there was a notebook on a small table underneath the window. So I wrote this.
If you’ve got 34 minutes to spare you can listen too. It’s an everyday story of country folk, mostly, with some odd and debatably funny things in it.
Without giving away the ending, or the location of the Prime Minister’s tattoo (for security purposes, of course) it’s about a farmer and a celebrity chef. The funny things happened when I was writing it. I’d been thinking about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who screamingly funnily becomes Pew Farley-Toherstall for the purposes of the play. So far so so. But he really did go to school and then up to Oxford with David Cameron. And if not even David Cameron would be bonkers enough to make Jeremy Clarkson Minister for Transport, there were certainly very strong rumours that Kirsty Alsop was going to be offered a Ministerial post prior to 2010 and turned it down. And she really is Cath Kidston’s cousin. And her daddy really was chairman of Christies. So you can make your own judgement about her career progression dahn the auctions, as she almost certainly doesn’t say unless she’s very drunk indeed.
For me the funniest thing was the pin number on the Prime Minister’s emergency phone. I gave this script to several people to have a look at it before we recorded. A solicitor friend so that the caution was correct, when Tom is at the police station. An actual police sergeant, for some of the procedural stuff. She said she hadn’t been on a firearms job but it sounded about right. Funny. She liked it. Just one thing.
I hate it when a police person says ‘just one thing.’
‘How did you know about the PIN number?’
It’s not really officially secret, she said, but you’re not really supposed to know about it.
And the honest answer is, I didn’t. I made it up. It was the most ridiculous thing I could think of, the most British procedural thing I could imagine, the thing you’d be most likely to forget under stress, which would be the only time you’d need it.
So it’s a fair cop, guv. You’ve got me bang to rights. I’m done up like a kipper. But I ain’t got previous and it was the voices made me do it.
And as she said, in the best Jack Reagan tradition before I poured her some more wine: ‘Shut it.‘
No chickens were harmed in the making of this production.
It used to make sense to describe voice plays – plays using voices and not actions – as radio plays. But like my Lifeboat Party radio show ( oh, do you? Brilliant! Would you like a drink?) a lot of radio isn’t on the er, radio, these days. If you see what I mean.
I can’t call this a radio play, sensibly. Which leaves me uncertain what to call it. A play for voices sounds really pretentious, as if I had a pipe to go with my roll-neck sweater. And a beige one at that. Obviously that would be the pretentious version of me; mine’s black. Well, ok, two of them are black and one’s a very dark blue, the difference being mine are practical and cool, like me.
Anyway, the play what I wrote. It’s mostly based on fact. Battery cages for laying hens are now illegal in the UK. You can still stick 25,000 chickens in a barn, cut a hole in the door so they could get out if they could get to the door and weren’t already traumatised and call them free-range or barn but that’s not the point of the story. If there is any point to this comedy it’s simply this plain moral: if you say ‘I could write a play..’ on your third drink then you may well have to.
So I did. The voices were recorded just before Christmas in a session that was going brilliantly until I got a phone call that made me feel sick. New significant other (and it turned out, rather temporary sig. oth. Very significant. Very definitely other, now) demanding to know why all my stuff was all over her kitchen and what was I going to do about it. In a line that screams out to be used in one of my poems (Discuss. Starting with whether they are or not) she delivered the killer blow:
‘I’m so annoyed that I’m not going to say what I want you to do about it. I’m so annoyed that I can’t actually speak about it. So I’m going to end this phone call now.”
I thought I was good at passive aggression.
Actually, that really does deserve its own poem, doesn’t it? But first, enjoy No Batteries Required. It’s just over the half hour.
You can listen to No Batteries Requiredby doing that thing dolphins do, just here:
Putting it about used to be a borderline smutty expression from the days when creepy uncles smoked panatellas and boasted about the two litre engines in their car while wearing lapels like an aircraft carrier for flies.
Add something as close to a Zappatta moustache as the Westbury Golf Club bar rules would allow and a vertical two-button waist on the tailored flares and you’ll know when we’re talking about, baby.
Everyone had a creepy uncle who thought he looked like this. It was the law back then.
Putting it about meant, in line with the mores of the times, not-so secret admiration for men doing it and public shame for women if they were. I won’t say ladies, because however many horseboxes they might have frequented at gymkhanas (gymkhanae?) ladies didn’t. Obviously they did, or some of them anyway, but it wasn’t discussed. Not if you wanted to stay in your tied cottage, anyway. It goes, or went, with the territory.
The kind of putting it about I meant to write about before we started the vintage shagging meme was cross-platform multi-media engagement. Or telling people you exist in the clamour of the global marketplace point para.
See what I did there? I’d been thinking of ways of trying to get some money in from doing my stand-up poetry in pubs I don’t actually like calling it poetry because let’s face it, it’s not exactly something Khubla Khan would have spent a languid afternoon listening to, and Omar Khyam (no, not the bloke
It doesn’t get better.
who did those electric shaver ads on TV) has already done the book of verse, a jug of wine and thou thing that sums up the ideal state in anything I write, even though the dominant theme is being English, in a way that more people used to be than now, thankfully, fingers clenched dangerously tight on the stem of a wine glass as hearts turn to stone to stop them breaking, accompanied by nice accents, bright smiles and garden furniture. It could be I’m just channeling A Bouquet Of Barbed Wire in some weird Rendlesham Forest time-slip. I could live with that.
Two months ago yesterday I did my first stand-up poetry gig. Or songs without music. Or whatever it is I do (see snark, therapy, showing off). It seems like a lot longer and I keep veering between thinking ‘haven’t done enough’ and counting Anchor four times, Golden Key twice, DP’s twice, Old Mariner, Grinning Rat, King’s Head, Wenhaston Star, or twelve in less than that weeks and thinking that’s quite a good start.
When I started I thought a single reading might be quite enough for the audience, but they continue to surprise me in a really nice way. I overheard two women I know in the way you know women in pubs. Reading this perhaps I didn’t quite mean that, or rather I meant the way you (sorry, one) knows women in pubs to talk to. At my age. And theirs. With our voices. And stuff.
Anyway, as we used to say. One was asking the other about my stand-up act I’d done in The Golden Key, at Snape, asking what it was like. “It’s really good.” Pretty, Dutch, eccentric clothes, says hello to me first. Oh, it was nothing really. You know. Would you like a drink?
Pleasant all this may be I’d still been thinking I wasn’t doing enough to get stuff out there, or put it about a bit, as people thankfully don’t say any more. I hope. Not that, but I’d noticed that while there are loads of talented musicians at the gigs I go to, almost all of them never promote themselves. Not so at The Grinning Rat. That was refreshing, finding practically every act closing with its Soundcloud file address, Twitter account and website, almost down to saying how you have to shove the gate a bit when you open the latch.
Not exactly pulling gear. Even in Suffolk.
I’d read an American article about how to promote your writing for fun and profit or something and and marvelled at the crass vulgarity of the idea of taking your own books along to your gigs and actually telling people they could buy them. I mean! The idea! Really!
I’m doing this gigging seriously. I like doing it. People seem to like me doing it, even if not the sort of people I thought would like it done. As it were. So I need to start telling people about my stuff. I’m finishing the sound edit on the new sound play No Batteries Required today. Then it goes on two local radio stations and Soundcloud for a start. Then I need to really get this cross-promotion thing going properly. And I need to do something about my stage image. Or maybe I don’t. This multi-media stuff is so confusing. I’ll just have a look on ebay for one of those scrolling LCD displays. You know the kind of thing they have in the post office to let you know the counter is free, only saying I am instead.
Note for younger readers: While most of this drivel is sadly true, there never was a golf club in Westbury. There may well be now, but back when the Triumph Stag was the pinnacle of smooth n sexy motoring there wasn’t. You can tell how long ago this all is by the piquancy of the idea that driving anywhere could be sexy. Or that anyone would use the word ‘motoring.’
It’s a stupid thing to do, but pretty much everybody does it. It’s how we spot the tiger in the long grass, how we look for the shorthand tell-tale signs and tribal marks that used to tell us ‘this stranger is safe’ or warned us not to get too close too soon.
How average people dressed
In black and white films at least, things were straightforward. Proper chaps wore hats, or as their womenfolk called them at the time, hets. That was some time ago and all of those pointers and signs changed a while back. Most days I wear a tweed coat (one does not say jacket, actually) and jeans along with Goretex-lined walking boots, a combination my father would have found baffling. He was never socially confident enough to wear tweed, and denim was something engine drivers wore in those days. And Goretex hadn’t been invented.
The thing is, I make as many assumptions about people based on what they wear and how they sound as anyone else. People make assumptions about me based on my voice. Most of them assume I used to have some money because of it, which isn’t even vaguely true. Last weekend I was freezing because I hadn’t had much sleep so when I went down to the Suffolk Arts Club I threw on anything warm I could find. A grey sweater with red hearts on it from TK Max. A long Musto stockman’s coat that’s kept me dry since 1991. Same old jeans and boots. And a scarf. And two people I thought knew me a bit said they could see I was wealthy due to the clothes I was wearing. Wrong. Flattering, but totally wrong.
Just as wrong as I’ve been about the audience for the stand-up poetry I’ve been doing. I did my 12th gig tonight, two months into this, at The Grinning Rat in Ipswich. I got there late because I hadn’t even decided to go until about nine o’clock when I finished work and by the time I got there it was almost empty apart from a small group of loud people drinking at the bar. Hurrah, I thought, exactly the audience I like, drunk and shrieking at each other at random. And if I’d made more sensible assumptions I wouldn’t have been surprised when after I’d done my set a woman from the group came over and touched my arm and said ‘thank-you, that was lovely.’
Somehow it’s never girls like this that touch my arm and say ‘Thank-you. That was wonderful. Take me home with you.’
It’s never the sensitive-looking girls. It’s never the artistic-looking men. Always but always it’s the toughest-looking men and to be frank, women, who make eye-contact during the set or at the bar afterwards, who come over making me ask myself ‘what did I say?’ and tap me on the shoulder or physically stop me leaving the pub. And just as I’m thinking ‘how do I get out of this and what was it I did that’s got me into this?’ they say odd things I’m not expecting.
‘We need more spoken word. Are you coming here again?’
‘You’re like me,’ from a skinhead with a pit bull terrier.
A silent thumbs-up in my face that I thought had been going to be a punch.
I’ve had a tough-looking rockabilly girl massaging my shoulders while I drank my pint, then giving me 20 minutes on why her relationship was so troubled. She didn’t want me to do anything about it, she just thought I was the sort of person she could speak to, after my poetry that I don’t even think is real poetry, just smart mouth and anguish and a couple of rhymes. Almost therapy, at times. You see what I did there? Smart mouth, as I said.
And they touch my arm. This is what I really don’t get. It’s always the same. Apart from one tap on my shoulder to get my attention (I really thought I was going to get punched that time) and one hand on my chest to stop me going through the exit (that wasn’t much fun in expectation either) huge blokes and hard-looking women come and do the same thing: they both touch my left arm (always the left one) above my elbow. Always. I don’t get it.
A lot of the stuff I do is about being upset. With a couple of the poems I sometimes have problems with a couple of lines if I’m thinking too much about why I wrote it in the first place. Maybe it’s therapy. I’ve certainly noticed that when I start to feel ok about things after being dumped (again) I can’t think of much to write about. But it gets through to the wildest, toughest looking people, people who don’t have voices like me, people who I thought from the way they looked would hate what I do, standing in front of a microphone with foppish hair and a voice like mine.
And more fool me, judging people from first impressions and appearance. Just more fool me. These strange, tough-looking people who look as if life hasn’t been its kindest to are my biggest fans. So I’m going to try to stop being an arse and wait to see what people are like before I judge them. The same way they have the grace to reserve judgement on me.
Can’t trust that day, as the Mamas and Papas nearly sang. It’s a special day today, which makes me wish I’d had more than two and a half hours sleep and didn’t have to fix my freewheel on my bicycle, which seems to be all crudded up as it’s come out of winter storage. It runs, but if you stop peddling the chain threatens to come off because – oh it doesn’t really matter because. I’m going to have to take the stupid chain tensioner on the derailleur apart, thinking as I do every year that the complete evidence that my life has gone fundamentally totally wrong is that I can’t afford £900 for a 14-gear Rohloff gear hub for my bicycle. Res ipsa loquitur, as if I’d said for a living I’d have one by now. It speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Ha ha. And bitter tears.
If I hadn’t thought about Wendy Sedgewick I’d have one of these by now.
Oddly, I think of new things when I’m short of sleep. Two new poems, one of which I might try out at the soiree (I know, get me) this afternoon, and remembering I actually have not one but two short stories of a readable length I could do either there or at the pub open mic at The Anchor afterwards.
First I need to get some sleep and fix my bike, but I could get the train one stop instead and cadge a lift back, I suppose.
So would you like a story? Would you? Have you been good? Ok, what story would you like, because we only have time for one before bedtime? What’s it going to be? One about a ghost cat? Or about a teenaged Mexican prostitute I met once?
Sorry? I didn’t say these were children’s stories, did I?
It isn’t easy being English. It’s not just the clothes you wear. Sorry, one wears.
Nor the things you think or the way you see things or the way you speak.
But when you hear it, especially when the English talk about relationships – sorry, not a very English word, I meant things like that – you know you really couldn’t be listening to any other people. Especially when you realise that when we say sorry we actually mean pay attention. I meant one means. Sorry.
I drove past someone’s house this morning and had a look to see if the garden furniture was still where I’d put it and the pergola was still there. And I thought of this. I don’t know whether to call it Being English or Things Like That. Or People Like Us, but I want to use that for something else and besides, not all of them do.
