I was walking yesterday, up along an old path called Into The Light, along the road a little way then north towards the railway, along an old drove road, towards the house of someone I used to know.
A man was burning a tree fallen in the storms and the pheasants shot into the air as I walked along a cart track underneath where they’d roosted. I went and talked to someone else who knew the same person and we didn’t mention her at all. I got back in the last of the light, out of the light and said hello to someone I didn’t know to stop an old man cycling into me in the dark.
Unwanted apples on a forgotten drove road. I think someone long ago threw away an apple core.
I thought about a poem I started years ago. I’ve never been able to finish it. I thought about a girl I used to know in Cornwall and I thought about the Spring coming and the old wartime things you sometimes discover walking here, still littering the fields and hedges after what, 70 years or something. Time moves at different speeds in some places, sometimes.
I don’t know whether to call this Walking With Blue or Last Defences. Let’s stick with the second one for now.
I put Golden Cap in for the Bridport Flash Fiction competition in 2012. It didn’t get anywhere, even though the real Golden Cap, the odd chewed-up hill slowly being eaten by the sea is just a couple of miles from Bridport. I spent a Christmas and New Year near there once. It was cold and snowy and magical. On Christmas Eve what seemed like the whole town streamed out of the pubs, teenagers, old people, the lovers, the estranged, and we all crammed into the stone church overlooking the sea, the same way people had done for hundreds of years there. There seemed to be something in my eye but it was very windy outside, after all.
I got a saxophone that Christmas, a present from a generous girlfriend, in the eighteenth century house we were staying in. One morning we both hunted for the mouthpiece all over the top floor flat we rented, then gave up and went into the town to buy another. We were out of luck; there were no music shops in a town like Bridport, or none selling saxophones. When we got back to the flat the mouthpiece was in the exact centre of the floor of the spare room. It happened in another flat on holiday too, with the car keys.
The rules of the competition were 500 words only; Flash fiction. I’m never sure about that. It’s fun as an exercise, but I don’t buy the line that people haven’t got time for more these days. It’s your job writing it to steal their attention. If you can’t keep it for more than 500 words that’s your fault, not theirs. But anyway.
A decent-ish little short for the forthcoming stand-up set. I need half an hour’s worth of material. And something for the soiree this weekend. What? Want to make something of it?
I grew up a long way from here, not just in terms of years but in distance. Over two hundred miles, a long way in England, anyway. It seems so. I lived in a small town of about 20,000 people but I never felt I knew everybody; I never have. Life started to change when I was about 18. There had been changes before that, but these were changes I was excited about, leaving home. Discovering things. Differences. The idea that not everywhere was like the little town I lived in. That other people had other ideas and some of them had ideas like me. Maybe it was the times, maybe it was just how old I was, but I felt change coming, an idea that things were going to change in a progressively better way. I don’t know people who think that way now.
At the same time as this idea of some non-specific progress I was becoming more aware of the past, from the grass mound at Avebury I’d drive past on the A4 going up to London to the fantastic vision of Brunel’s Paddington station, giving the ultimate lie to the gimcrackery of steampunk. Some of the trains I got back home were ancient, especially on the Sunday service to Westbury, but all of them had a certain feel about them, that they were taking me somewhere special. Not to Trowbridge where I lived, not to Westbury where the fast train junction was. But to the future, by way of the past. I wrote this a couple of years ago, mostly. But it speaks with the same voice I think I had back then.
Late Train Out of Paddington
Brunel’s vision of the West, starting at Paddington.
When I’d been to an interview for university
One year or another a long time ago,
I’d stay with my step-sister in Notting Hill.
She was ten years older than me
Doing Law after her PhD and going back
I’d get a late train out of Paddington.
I’d come up on the Thursday and wait for them to get home.
They had a light for burglars that came on by itself
So I could never tell if they were at home or not.
Often I hoped they were out so I could drink
In the Sun In Splendour, me with a book,
An actor from a TV cop show with his book too.
One night a woman came in asking about her friend
Who’d killed himself; No-one said they knew
Who she was talking about until she’d gone.
I’d smoked strong cigarettes and gone to a Russian bistro
Or we’d go to Geales’s for fish just around the corner,
Like everything else worth doing in London then.
I put my brass Zippo lighter on top of my cigarettes on the table.
I’d eaten broccoli quiche and good bread and butter
Cut with a razorlike old knife on thin antique plates.
I’d done my interview on Friday at UCL or Brighton or City
Or somewhere. I didn’t really care;
District Line tube at Paddington. Everything started and ended here.
But I wanted to be in Notting Hill back then.
I didn’t buy any henna for my hair in Portobello.
I didn’t buy a yak hair coat or a broken Anglepoise lamp
I could fix or 1940s French cordorouy trousers with braces off the stalls
But I saw a woman naked when I walked past her bedroom door.
Ten years older than me, an actress in a film
I hadn’t seen. My bare feet silent on the wooden floor.
I couldn’t mention it then. I still can’t now.
I’d drunk red wine and wondered how I was going to live here,
Before the Tube to Paddington, haunted with the ghosts of steam trains
Under Brunel’s airy iron roof, my train on the platform past the sign
Advertising Harlech Television, “Your Station Back Home.”
Sometimes the carriages were so old they had
Wooden windows pulled up by a leather strap.
After I’d found my seat and stowed my bag
And found out where the loo was
I opened my New Musical Express,
Or Sounds, spreading it out on the table
So people could see but really
I watched the white of the tall old houses
Backing on to the tracks.
I remember the hum of the big train flexing,
Then coasting over the points, gathering itself
While it tugged at the skirts of Georgian London,
Then the big quiet push of the diesel when it
Got the scent of open country,
Settling me into my seat
With a bottle of Special Brew from the buffet car.
Actually, better make that two.
Rain slashed the trees as the sun set around Reading;
I got glimpses of strangers’s lives and tried to remember
The two abandoned farmhouses near the tracks.
You and I could have lived in either of them
If I’d ever known where they were.
First I needed to do university, then when I had a job
Whatever it was, when I got paid and when
I’d learned how to fix-up houses,
When there was a different you
And the you I knew then had become someone else
And you were just an infrequent memory;
When I knew you would be. And anyway
Nothing really happened to go that way.
I can still see out of the window and hear the boom
Of the engine as it winds out towards Swindon.
I can see the naked white backs of Georgian houses
From the tracks that carry the late train out of Paddington
Another day, another cheery poem. I used this to close the night at the Wenhaston Star. It did the job well. Total silence, then clapping. Which was nice.
Then a bald-bloke barring my way out of the pub who wouldn’t let me go past until he’d said how much he liked it. It’s odd, I’m getting a lot of positive feedback (which I’m almost sure isn’t the kind of thing they’d say) from what look to me like the most unlikely people. Mostly with shaved heads. Mostly a lot bigger and tougher-looking than me. All of them visibly moved by my stuff, delivered by me. It’s been described rather flatteringly as raw and hypnotic. I think it’s something to do with telling honest stories about how people feel, in a way that men traditionally don’t tell them, or not in public, anyway.
That’s just my theory. I might be wrong. You could discuss it with my hard-looking fans if you like, out the back of the pub. Because they liked this one.
These Are The Last Things
This house is going now,
Claudia Myatt
Boxes packed, the vans booked,
Exchanging soon and these,
These are the last things
From my garden cooking.
Courgettes from the summer
That we shared sitting
Talking until late.
Until really it was much too late
For either of us to pretend,
Or for you to go home again.
This was my best Summer.
The summer of you and your dogs.
And your nose. And your voice.
And your hair. And your bent toes.
And just you, really. Just you.
And now I don’t have any of those things
With me almost every day.
Now I never know if, when I see you
In the street you’ll say hello or turn away;
It’s not just that it hurts me.
Not just that I don’t think
I deserved that. I make excuses for it
To my friends. It’s the way you are.
The way I was.
You’ve been through a lot, you know?
And yes, of course I talk about it.
It hurts so much too much not to
And I find that if I don’t then I cry.
But often, much more often than men are supposed to,
I wish it was. It’s just rather beautiful, when you’ve got through what relationship advisors call the stupid cow/what a bastard stage depending on gender, when you can think without whatever it is making the wrong connections in your brain and making you not you at all, everyone forgets that Icarus also flew; that there were two of you in this, whatever it was. And if it went wrong for you it went wrong for them as well. And that neither of you meant it to.
It’s Spring soon
Things end. But things begin as well, all of the time. Every day. So deep breath. Head up. Shoulders back. No name-calling. And smile. As Nat King Cole used to say.
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Co-dependency isn’t fun. There used to be a form of duelling in America where the two contenders were tied together by one wrist and given a knife each. Presumably the knife hand was held until the time to start the duel. Usually, obviously enough, both of them died. It always reminded me of a certain kind of relationship.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I’d rather have nothing
If nothing means you.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Yes, I know it’s late. Well you didn’t give me one at all, so just don’t start on me, ok?
Despite the fact that it’s St Valentine’s Day and once again, I am officially Less Attractive Than Hitler (Hitler had a girlfriend), the kind of rejection I was thinking of or at least I was until I had to think about that was the kind of rejection that goes like this:
He was right up her strasse, apparently.
We received nearly 2900 scripts, (Why do so many people send us all this crap? I mean, honestly!)
and our team of readers have been working intensively to sift through all submissions. Like rarely, thanks for nothing, yah? We very nearly missed something interesting to do, rather than what we’re paid for every month.
Our readers were asked to consider what the opening of each script demonstrated about the writer’s voice and originality, their understanding of medium, form, genre and tone, and the strength of the world, story, characters and dialogue. Yours was obviously unoriginal and your world frankly isn‘t as good as ours.
Unfortunately, your script did not progress beyond the first 10-page sift which was the case with 85% of all submissions we received. Your unoriginal derivative pile of identikit characters, seen-it-before stories and less-than-credible dialogue was dumped along with all the stuff from all the other losers on the first read through .This means that your script will therefore not be considered further and will not receive any other feedback. This means your script was crap.
We hope you will not be too disappointed or discouraged; we appreciate it will be frustrating not to receive specific feedback. This does not mean that your script has no potential – rather, that the standard of the work that did progress was very high, yours wasn’t and we can only focus on the necessarily small proportion of work that most captured our attention and imagination. Maybe you could read it out at a village fete or something. Or a childrens party, so long as they’re not too old or discriminating.
It’s a rejection slip, or a rejection e-mail, anyway.
Compared to some of the non-Valentine rejections I’ve had in the past, quite mild. No throwing stuff. No slammed doors. No going around with that bloke I always had an idea about half an hour later. Nobody’s relations on the phone, no screamy phone calls and no silent weeping, on either side. In comparison there’s almost a thread of logic there, which is a refreshing change given the usual lack of anything apart from the central no-part-of-your-body-is-welcome-in-or-frankly-all-that-near-any-part-of-mine-notwithstanding-any-prior-events logic that accompanies the non-Valentine-type rejection. In my experience, anyway.
This one was from the BBC. I won the BBC Writers Room Screenplay competition last year (M/f as we used to say in journalist college. It means More Follows. I think you’re confusing it with something with more letters.) so I thought I’d send them No Batteries Required, written for radio.
It’s actually really rather good. Even people who take a very let’s say “objective” view of my charm, wit and sophistication say that. At volume, sometimes. The bits about my CW&S, at least.
But the BBC don’t want it. But they want submissions for The Show What You Wrote, their new BBC Radio 4’s comedy sketch show – written by you. Free, obviously.
“This is an opportunity for you to get involved in creating a show that sounds different from any other sketch show out there. The Show What You Wrote is open for anyone to enter, whatever your level of experience. If you have a good idea then write it up and send it to us.
The themes for each episode are:
1) Science and Nature
2) Geography
3) Art and Literature
4) Sport and Leisure
I would. I really would, but this rejection thing has made me wonder. I mean, the BBC comedy bar is set pretty high. It’s going to be pretty hard to beat the Today programme, putting Lord Lawson, whose scientific credentials include being a reporter for the Financial Times and er, that’s it really, against actual climate change scientists and saying that makes the programme balanced. It makes it the fat bloke in the subsidised bar four pints in against someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Although to be fair, while he doesn’t know any more about what makes it blow than anyone else, like a true Thatcherite daughter of her father Nigella Lawson certainly knows how much blow costs. And suddenly, I don’t mind that particular rejection at all.
The Less Attractive Than Hitler thing, that I do mind. Still. Shower, shave and get out there to do another open mic and another one on Sunday. It might work. Worth a shot, anyway.
Oh and the red type? That was revealed using my patented iMean™ app. I use it regularly. Want to borrow it?
I couldn’t sleep last night so at 7:15 I turned the radio on. The Bishop of Bath & Wells is moving out of the Palace he lives in, into a house outside the city. Good thing or not. Discuss. It’s Sunday morning Radio 4.
Something for Bishops.
The story rang a bell with me, because I’ve had dealings with the bishop before. Long long ago when if not the world then certainly I was young, and thought I was leaner (turns out I wasn’t, given the jacket I tried on in a shop this week was a bit loose despite being the same size I wore when I was 26) and had a Harley-Davidson, the last of a reasonably long line of Yamaha, Honda, Triumph, Norton, Triton, BMW and then the Sportster motorcycles (pronounced Arlo Guthrie stylee, to rhyme with pickles, as we young people say), I was romantic. In fact, I was incurably romantic and still am.
It’s something women say they want until they get it. Then they seem to find that what they really, really meant was planning a wedding reception at a Best Western, two bottles of Cava per head and a fortnight in Ibiza rather than anything I had in mind, so far as I can tell.
Orchardleigh, under a West Country sky that put a permanent crease in my forehead by the time I was twenty.
My idea for a wedding venue started when I was about fourteen, the first time I went to Orchardleigh. I don’t know why I went. It was just something we did a couple of times a year. It was an old family estate and no, of course it wasn’t my family’s. Ours was called Sycamore Grove, which isn’t really the same thing at all.
Orchrdleigh had a not very attractive early Victorian house, loads of rolling fields, a plaque saying how the house used to be one side of the lake until years and years ago the owners had grown sufficiently rich and more than sufficiently bored with their old house to tear it down and start again the other side of the lake. But where did they live while they did that? No-one could tell me. Thinking about it now they probably built the new house first, but I didn’t think like that then. Still don’t, all the time.
It had an oak tree with a heart carved into the bark of the trunk and a date and two sets of initials. I can’t remember the letters, but the date was 1805. It was almost always sunny when we went to Orchardleigh, except, perhaps predictably, the time I was attacked by a swan. No, it didn’t break my arm. But also no, there was no warning I could see or hear and I didn’t know what had happened, it happened so fast. I don’t think I’m really cut-out for fighting swans, even now. Luckily I’ve planned things so it’s not something I have to do in my life.
We had an old book in the car in those days, an Arthur Mee The Kings England, written in the 1930s, listing the towns and villages of England with a few lines about each. About Orchardleigh there was something about an old war horse living out his days in a field a long way from Flanders. I don’t know now whether it was true or not, given how many horses the Army killed rather than feed them once the war was over. I thought it was true then.
There was a grave by the lake, one of the last owners, with a recent headstone.
And sleep at last
Among the fields of home.
I’m tired as I write this, really tired after just three hours of sleep last night, propped up in bed and about to turn in, but even reading the inscription that’s stuck in my head I feel the same way I always felt when I saw it that time ago, and it’s nearly half my life away that I last went to the lake at Orchardleigh. Moved, respectful, a little something in my eye, just a speck I think, probably. And envious, envious that someone, somewhere, tried to make sure that the person under the headstone was at peace, however fatuously, in a way I’ve never been able to imagine anyone ever doing for me.
A beginning and an ending.
As if that wasn’t enough for one place it had a Bath stone Georgian boathouse on the lake, an island and a tiny church on it. Orchardleigh has loads of high trumps and it plays to flush them all out on the table right from the start. Back when I was fourteen I decided I’d get married in that church, if I ever did. And because that’s what I was going to do I didn’t take any girlfriends to Orchardleigh ever, until I met someone I thought I’d like to marry.
We rode down there on the Harley one early summer morning and parked the bike by the gatehouse, then walked up the drive and found the tree, eventually, still there fifteen years after I first saw it. The boathouse was still there and the lake and the plaque and the grave and the house. And of course, the island and the little church. It all sort-of looked like it was working.
We rode back to London at the end of that week and I started trying to find out what you do to get married somewhere you don’t live. I knew Orchardleigh was in the diocese of the Bishop of Bath & Wells and I’d heard about bans and people having to live where the bans are read or something, although I had a feeling that might just be in Hardy or Thackeray. Phone the Bishop’s office, I thought. They’ll know.
The first issue was that Directory Enquiries had just changed from being a nationalised utility staffed by stiff and imperious crisply-spoken authority figures to the Del Boy gertcha customer service model that everything in England has become, where it’s all the pretence of saying ‘sir’ and no service of any kind. The other difference, obviously, is you pay a lot more for the new, rubbish model. Unbelievably and utterly rubbishly, Directory Enquiries pretended (after they’d taken my money of course) that there was no number for the Bishop of Bath & Wells.
Not. Going. To. Happen. I can tell.
I pointed out that the bishopric was 800 years old and although they probably hadn’t had a phone for all of that time, I was pretty sure they had one now. Despite that, Del Boy’s Directories couldn’t give me the number
They had a number for Bishop of Bath though. I took that.
Ring out, wild bells
I was quite impressed when the bishop answered the phone himself on the third ring. More impressed, if a bit disconcerted, to find they’d picked a local man to do the job, judging by the sheepy noises he made bleating ‘Bishop of Bath.’ You have to have heard it to know how that sounds. I could do it now but it wouldn’t help you, reading this. Sorry.
I told the bishop what the problem was, that I wanted to get married at Orchardleigh, that it was in his diocese (‘if you say so’) and the bans and residency qualifications and how long and what was it all going to cost and could it be done at all. And stuff.
Don’t know, the bishop said. He could see the problem and he’d like to help, but he got three calls like this a week.
I thought that even for a busy bishop this wasn’t actually the most helpful thing I’d ever heard.
Me: How come?
BoB: ‘Cuz Bishop of Bath has been a motorcycle shop since 1926.
Tis a sign and/or a portent, I think. I only proposed to one other person. None of the three people I ever talked to about getting married ever took me up on it. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Looking at this, I don’t think it’s supposed to.
I scribbled Songs Without Music down after my shower on Sunday and used it to introduce the set that night, at The Anchor, Woodbridge, where almost everything started and very sadly, one thing stopped.
As soon as I stepped off the stage I was invited to an afternoon of song and art and poetry that half of Woodbridge wanted to go to. I think that might have been part of it. Pity. But it started the stand-up gigs and it got me this rather lovely artwork that flowed from my reading.
Raw and Hypnotic
I was more than a bit surprised to hear my stuff called this that. I’d done some work on the delivery, making it less converstaional even though I’m always a bit scared it’ll drift into ‘POETRY READING WITH VOICES’ territory, (you see what I mean?) which takes the life out of it and means people feel they have to clap even if it’s utter crap. Although I don’t think they’d do that in the pubs I’d played.
A tough-looking bloke half my age came up to me and said ‘you’re like me’ after this gig. A slightly drunk rocakbilly girl massaged my shoulders while I drank a pint of cider after. Never before. After the gig, you understand. After the gig.
It’s reaching people, somewhere in thier hearts. Poetry isn’t just for books in libraries. It’s for talking, maybe to yourself, or to the thing inside us all. It’s very, very flattering that so many different types of people are hearing this. I’m assuming of course that an entire pub going silent is a good thing. I could always be wrong.
