Resolutions: 2014

There’s an old Wicca tradition about bad stuff. I know, I’m doing a lot about traditions at this time of year, but it’s a good time of year for it. Christmas is over and whatever you think about that, the days are going to get longer and longer until they’re magically, sleep-stealingly long, the way they were when I swapped stories and dreams with someone with a bottle of wine under a eucalyptus tree last summer.

After this year I have a lot less bad stuff to get rid of. But I’m going to write down some things I’m going to do this year and being a hip and happening kind of guy I thought I might as well put these things here, where everyone can see them and challenge me on them. So here they are. My resolutions for 2014. Or goals. My resolutions are for me and those they affect. My goals, well, this will kick me on along towards them. As we say down the stables.

1) I will direct and broadcast No Batteries Required on radio.

2) I will re-draft No Batteries Required as a screenplay and pitch it to Cascade, same as Not Your Heart Away.

3) I will find an independent publisher for Not Your Heart Away.

4) I will learn to play the ukelele. Actually, on advice from a friend who thinks my saxophone playing is pretty good, I’m sending the ukelele back and making a promise to myself to play the saxophone every single day. A quick blast through Kirsty McColl’s A New England  was today’s effort, copied from the radio. The radio in my head, anyway.

5) I will perform 3 poems at the Open-Mic night at The Old Mariner, Woodbridge, 29th January.

6) I will write The Cloud Factory.

7) I will finish writing Janni Schenck, which started life as School Lane.

8) First I will decide the format for Janni Schenck, film, book or play.

9) While I’m there I might as well re-draft No Batteries Required as a stage play and get it performed, probably using the same actors and actresses who are doing it for radio.

10) I can’t actually think of a tenth thing. I mean, I can, but I can’t really put that on here publically so not that, not here. Instead, I will get better at playing my old low tone saxophone. I might even team up with someone who can do the music while I do a 1940s crooner set. This is a thing in my head. In a progress update I’ ve found someone, but she’s a bit committed. Life stuff. You know. Stuff.

I don’t know why when I was 14 the first album I ever bought was original 1944 RCA Victor Glenn Miller recordings. But it was and they were and they’ve stuck in my head forever. And I thought the other day that a Christmas present to myself might usefully be a mic-ed-up concert uke to accompany the songs I’ve always known. The Nearness of You. Fools Rush In. The Glenn Miller version obviously, not the pathetic Bow Wow Wow lift musak one. And probably Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens, the song my disappeared friend Simon Talbot used to introduce his radio show in Florida, about a thousand years ago. Or maybe How Long Will I Love You? If you want to do something useful in 2014, find Simon and tell me where he is. A lot of people who love him would like to know. And we don’t. It’s been years now. We miss him. A lot.

 

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When the animals talk

I took a trip back through time this Christmas. In those strange days between Christmas itself and the New Year, when nothing is as it should be, when it’s too late to do much about this year and too early to do much about the next I drove to Poole to see an old friend, then up to Warminster to see an even older friend, one whose voice I used as Liz in Not Your Heart Away. I took two of her children to Bath. They wanted to do some shopping and I wanted to see yet another friend in the city. They were about the age Ben and Claire and Liz were in the book.

IMG_1642Along the way I turned off the A36 in Rode and took the old route I’d driven a hundred times and more, the same way Claire and Ben drove in the book to find The Red Lion. It’s fiction. I should have known. And I should have known better. It’s not just that the past is another country and they do things differently there. Whoever wrote that didn’t say ‘and they build executive homes in the car park of the Red Lion and ponce-up what was a brilliant pub into someone’s Disney fantasy of a baronial hall to live in.’

But things are never exactly as they seem. It all reminded me of a Christmas tradition we have or had in my family. I don’t know if anyone else still keeps it. I couldn’t, this year. Our tradition goes that at midnight on Christmas Eve, the animals talk. The year before I was born my mother and father stayed on my aunt’s farm and nearing midnight went into their stable to see if it was true, that the animals really did speak.

Last Christmas I went to church close to midnight but this is a dying village. The church was closed. As I got near the dark and silent building I remembered that Midnight Mass had been brought forward to six pm, a more convenient time for the old people who make up most of the village and all of the congregation. As I walked home along the empty road I remembered my family’s story. I got a torch and went to the tree where my chickens roosted then and shone it on the big young cockerel. I heard the church clock strike and as the light caught him the cockerel stirred and put his head back.

And is it true? Do the animals speak, remembering a stable in a story?

What sort of question is that? Of course it’s true. Nobody ever said they have to speak with a human voice.

 

 

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Year End

IMG_1648A bit like the end of term round-up, this post. If I was marking up 2013 though, I’d have to have a word with its parents and note ‘must try harder’ on its report.

What did I do this year? Some of the things I set out to do. Got rid of my house. Re-homed most of the chickens. Won the BBC Writers Room competition. Did I mention that? Oh. Ok. Well, actually, I won the BBC Writers Room competition.

With a screenplay based on my book, Not Your Heart Away, which I also finished and published this past year.

Wrote some poems.  Got a radio show. Wrote No Batteries Required, about a bankrupt chicken farmer who decides to kidnap a celebrity chef the same day the Prime Minister he was at school with goes to offer him a job as Minister of Food.

Anything else? Quite a lot. Tried to help. Lost my heart. Found it again. Put it in trust for someone who might appreciate it. Tried to stop acting like an arse quite as much as I managed to do for several months this year. Vowed to listen more and decide less. Walked a lot. I liked that. Took some decent photos. Got a new house to live in, that I think is nicer than the one I moved out of. Saw some old friends, made some old friends (no, not like that), caught up with some old friends and realised how fantastically valuable they are when you need them.

Tried to write School Lane, a story that started in Not Your Heart Away, a story about an old man who had been a young boy when he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, like almost every other small boy in Germany. And I couldn’t do it. Maybe I can next year. It became too complex, too involved, too much about Janni Schenck, the boy whose teacher beat him and his classmates up to stop them being killed by the American patrol coming to their village. Janni’s story expanded to include the Edelweiss Pirates, which meant I had to get him from Hamburg where they hung out to a small village in the mountains, where the real story, the one I heard from an old man in a pub long ago now was set, which was a story in itself.

And alarmingly, bought an electro-acoustic ukelele to do an open-mic 1940s crooner set comprising Fools Rush In, The Nearness of You and either Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens or How Much Do I Love You. Maybe. Or April Played The Fiddle. That bit might need some work. Like learning the ukelele for a start. And it’s sung impossibly high for me. I could do it fine when I was fourteen. Can’t do it now.

So this year coming, 2014 is a new start. New house. A new heart and some new friends.  See you there.

 

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Back to Ourselves

It’s been a hectic time, this Christmas, with a house move, a move into a hotel, a trip to Wiltshire and back, some 600 miles, then another house move and just time to meet some incredible new people and glimpse a life I know. So sorry, I haven’t posted anything recently. But as I was going through my stuff I found time to post up this poem what I wrote recently. It’s a bit Hugo Williams derivative, but I like Hugo Williams. It’s not about anybody specifically, just the end of summer, the end of holidays and the way people change, too.

 

 

 

Back to Ourselves

 

When one of us or both decide

That the songs don’t matter,

That it’s done, that we do have

A choice and somehow we don’t

Have to do the things that last week

Or last month or even yesterday we had

To do instead of everything else;

On the last day we start packing for

The trek back to ourselves after

Our little holiday, sand between

Our toes, another little white line,

And something sticking at the corner

Of our eyes; I expect it’s just a speck,

Probably. But you know, glad we went.

But we’re tired now and grateful to

Be home again, bags unpacked now

That we’ve shut the door;

Time to turn the lights on soon.

It gets so dark so early now.

I can’t quite see where I am at all.

 

Carl Bennett 2013

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The enemy within

There was a miners’ strike 30 years ago. Now you have to explain to people what miners actually were. They were the British men who dug the coal we were told we didn’t have that is imported now instead of digging out the 200 years of the stuff sitting underground. Ten years back before that the government switched the electricity off to make people believe the miners were ‘holding the country to ransom’ in a way that banks and financial fraud never does. Chiefly because the banks had lawyers who would shut your mouth for you if you mentioned it and the NUM didn’t.

When you watch this video you will see a Britain that a lot of people who lived here then can recognise while few foreigner can. I still hate Thatcher’s voice, along with every single one of her policies. That whining, artificial, hypocritical drone filled the airwaves with lies.

“We don’t talk to terrorists. The IRA must be denied the oxygen of publicity” while the government was talking to them all of the time for just one single example. Oh actually, ‘violence doesn’t pay’ for another. It was supposed to pay for Our Brave Boys who were sent to fill bodybags in the Falklands, a place the Foreign Office had been discussing giving away to Argentina since 1946, when the election would have been lost otherwise.

It wasn’t the miners who were the enemy within. It was the lying media that chose to report one side and not the other, time and again. Back then, 30 years ago, a friend of mine worked for BBC TV. He was a young news reporter in the thick of a demo that was kicking off when he walked past a police van with the back doors open. It was full of guns. Not confiscated guns from arrested miners. The miners didn’t have any guns. These were guns the state’s enforcers had decided they’d take to the demo to shoot miners with. There was never even a public allegation that the miners had guns and what happened next showed that would have been all over the media if any government minister had even suggested it, or there was any police intelligence to back it up.

My friend saw the police guns. He had the camera. He didn’t switch it on. His boss said it wasn’t even interesting.

About six years after that a man called Michael Ryan went berserk in a small town and shot lots of people with guns he should never have been licensed to have, given the list of offences and complaints to the police that had been made about him. In those days it usually took about six weeks to get a firearms certificate. Ryan got his in a few days, for reasons that the police have never seen fit to discuss. But then, a lot of what happened at Hungerford isn’t discussed. One of the tabloids showed American armoured vehicles on the streets of this small English town, although since when Hungerford became part of the jurisdiction of Greenham airbase was never mentioned.

There was a rumour the SAS were involved in ending the proceedings that day. That a helicopter had taken off from Hereford and somebody onboard had sniped Ryan, which was at odds with the official version that he had shot himself. Pictures of the body were only shown in camera at the inquest. There was never, ever an official enquiry. But the media didn’t want to talk about that either. I met a man who totally legally built sniper rifles for a comfortable living. He sold them, perfectly legitimately, to armed forces around the world. So when someone came to him with some information that what happened at Hungerford was extra-judicial murder, the same way it had been in Gibralter, when IRA suspects had been gunned down in a carpark by the SAS, with photos of a neat high-velocity hole through a school window to back it up, he tried to get it made public.

My friend came and interviewed him. I was there. We all looked at the photos. I wouldn’t know one type of bullet hole through glass from another, but remember what one of us did for a living.

My friend made some notes. Went back to the BBC. We’re not going to run it. It’s ‘not in the public interest.’

So now you know. When your government decides to shoot people without a trial the BBC don’t want all the fuss of telling anyone about it. And the miners are supposed to be the enemy within. That makes sense to me.

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Somewhat overshadowed

Not to be confused with sloightly on th’oof, whatever that bit of fake Suffolk dialect means this week’s Lifeboat Party show as slightly overshadowed by the fact that as of 16th December I become homeless. It’s not an experiment and I haven’t messed up my life more than usual for the rest of this year, although frankly that’s not saying much.

I’m selling my house. My stuff is going into storage and I have somewhere to live as of the new year, but right now, now, very now, as Shakespeare put it, I’m a bit stuck.

So I was a bit bothered about the show. We had a baking ukelele player on first, or maybe a ukelele playing baker, Martin Clarke,  who had the decency to drop his bombshell half an hour after we came off air, telling me he’d been a radio presenter for 17 years. Yes. Ok. Cheers Martin.

Then I tried to interview Emma Thomson again, after I totally messed up the sound in her first interview. Emma’s plan to race cyclocross for Elmy Cycles in Ipswich, as well as raising money for cancer research ahs been a bit altered by the fact that someone has stolen all three of her bikes. These aren’t exactly the kind of thing that you can get in Halfords or Tesco, even if it is Christmas.

Just checking the recording now and I think it’s going to be ok.

Mega line-up next week, with not just Justine de Meirre but Buckshee as well. Check-out their sounds. See how down with the kids I am?

It’s going to (folk) rock. Sorry. Meanwhile I still need somewhere to live for jsut over Christmas. A dog is for life. I’m  not. Ask anyone. Or actually, maybe don’t.

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