Simon Kuper wrote in the FT today (April26th 2014) about inequality being the new apartheid and how unfondly he remembered the old one back in South Africa.
“I remember white South African liberals bemoaning apartheid while their black maid served supper. Most of them didn’t want to end apartheid. They just liked liberal talk.”
I grew up in times I used to think were different to now, but the older I get the more I don’t think they are at all. There were 1200 children at my school. Two were black. I don’t know if that’s changed and this wasn’t some elite fee-paying school, just the ordinary school in an ordinary West Country town. There just weren’t many black people there, it was as simple as that. There weren’t many opportunities for integration for that reason too. It wasn’t that we weren’t into multi-culturalism. We just didn’t have a multiplicity of cultures.
This is a panga. It’s about as remarkable as a Swiss Army knife in South Africa.
But the kids whose parents had come down from London set out to cure all of that. Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part were taken as part-documentary, part training film. The unbelievable Um Bongo advert (Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo just in case your memory, hopefully, has blotted it out) was sung with gusto in the swimming pool changing rooms, that hot-bed of closet gayness where masculinity was supposed to be demonstrated by staring at and commenting on the size of other people’s cocks.
It was a different time. Maybe. People now beginning to think about retiring from Thatcher-fuelled careers in accountancy but also actuaries, doctors and builders alike all happily larded conversations with words Nigel Farage probably says to his bathroom mirror. A sentence that didn’t include the word coon or wog was a sentence wasted according to one graduate of the London School of Economics, to my certain knowledge.
But I also met someone at university whose family had managed to get themselves asked to leave South Africa for being too white liberal by the apartheid government. I was reminded about her when I read Simon Kuper.
She told me about the time when after standing up for the blicks to the extent the government didn’t like it, that Swapo or Zanu or someone decided to raid her parents’ house, waiting for her father to come home. Because they were opposed to discrimination they didn’t have a gun in the house. And also because they’d planned in advance he drove past; they left an innocent-looking postcard in the window next to the front door. If it was safe to come in you took the card down. If the card was up you didn’t go in the house. The card was up.
The raiders got bored and took themselves and their pangas away. Her father and the whole family lived to get out of South Africa another day.
I asked what had happened to the cook, the gardener and the pool boy.
“Oh, they wint thir.’
They were taken by Zanu or Swapo or whoever it was?
“Nah, they knew it was going to hippen. It’s wit they’re lak.”
Suffolk is still haunted by the war, specifically by the airfields that made George Orwell who lived here call England Airstrip One in 1984, a tribute to the fact that where I live you can’t drive more than ten miles in any direction except the sea without coming across yet another mile long strip of concrete crossed by two more to make a giant A. Or where they’re gone, a trading estate and a small memorial, usually with two flag poles, a plaque and a wreath. The numbers are horrifying. 82 dead at the little fighter airfield down the road in Leiston, given that these were single seater aircraft. Two hundred and forty something at a plaque I read in Thetford yesterday, a tribute to a Czechoslovakian squadron there, the kind of people Nigel Forage wouldn’t let polish his Lobbs. If he actually has any.
I read this poem when I got home from work, the ball-turret gunner. It’s very, very short. The ‘analysis’ of it is why people don’t like poetry, or English, or school.
POEM EXPLICATED : The ball turret gunner as allegory of the modern state
Wednesday, 04 July 2012 06:30 Mark Jensen
In 1945, Randall Jarrell published a short poem about the death of a ball turret gunner in the Second World War.[1] —
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER
By Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell was a genius. But to understand the poem you have to know several things.
Thing One: There was an enormous air war over Germany from 1943 to 1945 after General Eisenhower decided not just to take the fight to the enemy, but simply to destroy Germany. Not nullify its army or make it militarily incapable, but along with Bomber Harris, decide to destroy it. I met an American fighter pilot. I asked him how before sat nav and onboard radar and identification transponders, when outside of radio from base the only way to link up with the bombers to protect them was to see them and fly close enough to be handy but not so close the gunners hosed you down with fifty calibre on general principles, which apparently happened a lot more than once when mere mortals standing five miles high got flak happy. He told me that when you were supposed to escort 1,000 bomber raids all you had to do was follow the con-trails in the sky, the water vapour in the exhausts cooling and making a road in the sky. You don’t assemble that many of anything if you don’t want something gone for good.
Contrails. The sharply curved ones are from the fighter escort.
Thing Two:
Hanging underneath B17s and B24s was a ball-turret. It was a plexiglass dome that a small man sat in along with two machine guns spitting out one minute’s worth of bullets half an inch across. He couldn’t see anyone else for up to eight hours, as he hung suspended in his seat, separate from the land only by a thin sheet of plastic and 30,000 feet of air. You see the lump underneath the airplane, about half way along it. Ball-turret.
Thing Three: German anti-aircraft shells made black smoke when they exploded.
Thing Four: In the bomber war the USAAF flew by day. The RAF flew at night.
If Mark Jensen, whoever he is, had known all of these things instead of just some of them maybe his review wouldn’t have been the sort of tendentious bollocks that makes people vow never to read another book after they’ve left school.
FALLING INTO THE STATE AND AWAKING TO DIE By Mark Jensen
United for Peace of Pierce County July 4, 2012
The speaker in this 1945 poem is a ball turret gunner who has died. We know almost nothing about him. The gunner is speaking to us, mostly in a flat tone, but occasionally with terse lyricism, about his death. Since he is dead, the speech is disembodied. It is, evidently, the gunner’s voice as imagined by the poet.
Properly speaking, there is no setting of time or place for his speech, as is also the case for his death, in a sense. The casual reader probably imagines that the gunner has died at night. While this is likely enough, it need not be so, since the blackness of the “black flak” may refer to the doom it brings the gunner rather than the time of day, and the “nightmare fighters” may be nightmarish because they are what he most feared. The gunner’s death occurred “six miles from earth,” so far about the planet’s surface that the life below seems merely a “dream” — so abstracted (“into the State”) from ordinary life that his death, too, seems a dream, a “nightmare.” But of course it is not a dream, as the brutal final line of the poem blandly conveys.
What black meant.
I can’t even bear to go on. Already the total ignorance (no, the black is about the time of day) is balanced only by the high school conviction that no other interpretation is possible. And utter crap. The black flak, or anti-aircraft shells exploding, was black because that was the colour it was. Nothing to do with the time of day, which was in any case day rather thannight. Utter, utter bollocks, as English teachers should be encouraged to say faced with crap like this.
This is a shot-up ball turret. You can see the problem.
As for “the nightmare fighters may be nightmarish because they are what he most feared,” THE BALL TURRET GUNNER WAS HANGING OUTSIDE THE SODDING AIRCRAFT. HE WAS USUALLY, ALONG WITH THE TAIL GUNNER, THE FIRST ONE TO BE SHOT AT. And breathe.
The poem’s first words remind the reader that the gunner had a mother, was ofwoman born, and was taken from her (suggesting his extreme youth) and thrust so naturally into the service of “the State” that it seemed he “fell into” his military role. But in fact there was nothing natural about it: crammed into his “ball turret,” the gunner is “hunched” and reduced to animal-like discomfort (“my wet fur froze”). Calling attention to the outrageousness of something that appears so natural, or rather so socially obligatory, is the central purpose of the poem.
And another central purpose of the poem is a reminder that when you fly for eight hours and are terrified for several of them and you are five miles up in the sky in winter without any heating and no onboard WC, there are inevitable consequences which the reviewer might have thought about if he wasn’t writing bollocks like ‘of woman born.’
And what is this outrageous thing? That war snatches boys from their mothers, stuffs them into the belly of the state, and consumes their lives — then “washes” them “out” to make room for more. Consciousness of this seems only latent in the laconic gunner, who has a hard-bitten economy of speech. No romantic he. This tone is achieved by simple vocabulary and dispassionate declarative sentences uttered from beyond the grave — the grave his mutilated remains, “washed . . . out of the turret with a hose” (a steam hose, Jarrell said in a commentary on the poem), probably never had.
Crap, crap and more crap. Only latent, this consciousness? Nobody onboard those aircraft wasn’t conscious of the fact that statistically, they weren’t coming home. How does anyone write stuff like “No romantic he”?
The action of this compact poem is very simple: from “sleep,” and not even his own sleep, the gunner “woke” — and “died.” The brevity of it all almost suggests a revelation, a revelation of a bleak, “black,” “nightmare,” sort. Instead of awaking in a dark wood, like Dante, to be guided by Virgil to a beatific vision, the gunner awakes to death and recounts his own demise as if it were some nihilistic vision.
I don’t really know what else being shredded by 20mm cannon and your squashy remains needing a hose to get them off the airplane could actually be, other than a nihilistic vision, the sort of thing people buried in a bucket might have. My father was in the RAF in the war. He was ground crew, not the pilot he pretended to be, but he once let slip that cleaning out shot-up aircraft was punishment duty.
The events the gunner describes do have a dreamlike quality: “falling” from his “mother’s sleep . . . into the State,” “hunch[ing] in [the State’s] belly” until his “wet fur froze . . . [s]ix miles from earth,” he is “loosed from [earth’s] dream of life” before being loosed from life itself by the dire, fell forces to which “the State” has exposed him. But in the final line the dreamlike quality disappears: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”
From another’s sleep, awakening to death; then disposal of the remains. Who has betrayed whom? Who is to blame? The reader is invited to wonder whether the mother is responsible, or the State (with its capital S), or the “nightmare fighters” with their “black flak” (rhymes withack-ack), or even the gunner. Are we all to blame? By phrasing the initial line in such an artfully oblique manner, Jarrell invites the reader to turn his poem about like a rough-cut jewel, seeking the proper perspective. For surely there must be a proper perspective. But it is in the nature of war to instill doubt about this — a doubt that is appallingly expressed in the final, banal image of “a hose” in action.
The gunner — merely a boy — is “loosed from [earth’s] dream of life,” then “washed . . . out of the turret with a hose.”
Look more closely at the first line. “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.” Falling here is metaphorical — it implies a change from an exalted condition to a degraded condition, from the condition of precious beloved offspring to that of instrumentalized military functionary. But the fall is not from the mother’s love, but from her “sleep.” “From” (the poem’s first word) her sleep. Note that from can mean many things. It can refer to a starting point — and is a “mother’s sleep” not the starting point of us all? But from can also refer to a separation or an exclusion — by going to war, the gunner had to leave his home behind. Finally, from can also refer to cause : the gunner “fell into the State”because his mother was sleeping — was perhaps unaware, or not cognizant, of what her son was doing — had she known, had she been awake, perhaps his doom could somehow have been avoided, or evaded. Perhaps he would not have had to die as he did, to die not as some heroically falling warrior, but to die as a mangled, shredded, torn, disfigured deposit of matter smeared on the walls of a ball turret that has to be “washed . . . out” (to be used again).
In this poem, “the State” has a “belly.” But unlike in his “mother’s” belly, in “its belly” he was not warmed and nurtured, rather he “froze” and “died.” Perhaps the “dream of life” that turned into a “nightmare” is not the earth’s after all, but “the State”‘s. For “the State” is personified in the poem as a monstrous mother who consumes her young, a Gorgon. Enlistment is entering into a voracious vagina dentata that kills. This is a Gorgon that wears no mask; rather it is her own offspring that she transforms into objects of horror — all the more horrible in this poem for the ironic litotes of the final line, for of course it is not “me” that is “washed . . . out of the turret with a hose” but a putrescible semiliquid agglomeration of organic matter fit only to be “washed . . . out” with a (steam) hose.
And yet more bollocks. And yet more repetition. Five miles high if you aren’t wearing an oxygen mask you will be dead in seconds. So you can be pretty sure that the writer, knowing this, whatever else he had in mind, certainly didn’t have anything unmasked in there as well.
The entire poem becomes a symbol, perhaps, of the potential relation of the individual to the modern state.
I detest the word ‘perhaps.’ Is it or isn’t it? At best, it’s just a filler word. At worst, as it is here, it’s ‘let’s crap on for another five minutes and if anyone says ‘that’s bollocks actually’ you can still say ah yes but I said perhaps. So second year.
After all, this is a poem written in 1945, the year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is it all of human history that Randall Jarrell has, perhaps unwittingly, allegorized in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”? The poem was written in a dark disordered time. And the rhythm of the poem is disordered, too. Only the last line, which reports how his remains are cleaned up, is ordered, anapestically: (???|????|???|????). The other lines of the poem are in a state of metrical disorder, one plausible reading of which is this:
???|??|??|?????
???|???|????|??
??|??|?|?????
??|???|???|???
In the third and fourth lines, when the aircraft is under attack, the disorder is most extreme. The rhyme scheme, too, is disordered and defective: abcdb, with no rhyme in the third and fourth lines.
Jarrell’s poem is a masterpiece. So well-received was it that he feared that it would be his only literary legacy. But could there be a finer one?
All this review is in the main is repetition, but there is a huge amount of pomposity seasoned with nonsense and gibberish as well. Why does it annoy me so much? Perhaps because I see these memorials most days, silent at the side of East Anglian roads.
There are no words worth saying. They killed in thousands. They died in thousands. Remember them all. And don’t let it happen again.
Perhaps because of the numbers on the plaques, the Aarons and Fletchers and Ottos, the smart young men in the recruiting films who never came home again. Perhaps because anyone who can dick about, inserting vagina dentata into this straightforward poem has issues not just with vaginas but seems to feel a war is as welcoming, otherwise the reference makes no sense at all; but maybe, being American and safely in no danger of being bombed except by disgruntled homegrown pretend fascists, that’s exactly how he sees wars. And who the ***K says explicated, anyway?
Within a month someone in the UK government is going to say in public, out loud, that it would be a good idea to send soldiers to fight in the Ukraine. I think this is why this stupid analysis of this short poem irritates me so much. It misses the point entirely, so wrapped in its own self-importance.
Walking past an optician’s the other day (at least it looked like an optician’s shop) I saw one of those things that makes at least me go hmmm. Not in a good way.
Heston Blumenthal spectacles.
Someone with memory challenges, if it’s about oysters.
If there’s any need at all to continue then I just will.
Nigella and Jamie Oliver cookware was bad enough. I could just about tolerate Jamie Oliver cookware because after all he was actually a trained chef who’d put the hours in and like Anthony Worral Thomson might be presumed to know what’s rubbish in a busy kitchen, rather than choosing something because the colour matched his nail varnish.
Gok Wan spectacles were stretching it, for me, not just because I detest the simpering silly fey queen act he has to put on for the camera on the orders of his director (Gok Wan says he’s a pint and a game of footie bloke who happens to be gay, so don’t blame me) but because I can’t see what a stylist has to do with spectacles.
Or actually, thinking about it and so long as he doesn’t get involved with the prescriptions and puffing air into your eyes while you look at a balloon, I can. I mean, presumably his job used to involve trawling through catalogues and buying hundreds of frames on sale-or-return before a gruelling morning with clients trying to find the has-to-be-that-one-
John Denver aviator frames never really caught on.
darling frame that would make someone look like they liked wearing glasses when nobody really does in case they look like the kid in the NHS specs on the special desk in Mrs Jones classroom, before John Boy Walton, John Denver and John Lennon made round lenses temporarily acceptable. And why the spooky unexplained mystery internet conspiracy Illuminati coincidence of them all being called John?
Ok. So Gok Wan. Nigella. No, sorry, I can’t stand Nigella. I’ve never liked cartoons apart from Tom and Jerry.
Less of a ludicrous pastiche than Nigella.
But Heston Blumenthal is a cook. I’m not going to call him a chef in the same way I don’t call Nigella a chef. Because they both aren’t. Chefs are trained. Neither of those two ever did a day’s training. Epitomising the great Neo-Con Lie, Blumenthal says he taught himself, so he can take all the credit when it goes right, presumably.
Obviously it’s not his fault when it goes wrong. For example, when he poisoned over a hundred people who came to regret going to the Fat Duck at Bray, although interior decorators probably did very nicely out of that particular epidemic of food poisoning that the local Environmental Health Inspectors felt was just one of those things, in a way they signally never do if you have a restaurant and not a TV show as well. Try being called (Your Name Goes Here)’s Kitchen or the Balti Star and see how long you’re open if you give ten people food poisoning, let alone 240 customers spinning like toxic Catherine Wheels, but the kind nobody is going to say ‘oooooh’ about. Although a hose might still come in handy.
Just imagine.
A cook. Heston Blumenthal is a cook. He shaves his head, presumably because he’s going bald or maybe he just read Skinhead under his desk in RE too often. He wears chefs whites, presumably he pops into the kitchen now and then. Big watches, because hey, it’s a guy thing. I’ve got one. I can’t quite see (ahahaha, geddit?) how that qualifies him to design spectacles.
Ok, he wears them. They make him look like a Thunderbirds puppet. I wear glasses too. I’m actually doing it now. Reckon we’ll see the Writer-Insighter range at Boots any time soon?
I was thinking about music, trying to find something I’d like to listen to that I hadn’t heard before but I’d like. The impossible challenge. Impossible until you find it anyway.
That Sound
I was thinking about music, the way you do.
That feeling that you’d really like to hear something different,
Something new but when you do, it really isn’t.
I was thinking about music, the way you do
What is it about that sound?
It’s like buying a car or a guitar
Made before you were even born.
Louis Jordan said it the first time:
You cain’t get that no more.
It’s sort of ok to mourn the past if you’ve lived it
But really, what is it that you’re looking for there?
What is it about machine heads going slack,
Ivory grooves worn by strings you can’t buy anymore
All to get that authentic tone that half the guitarists
Back in the day cursed because you can’t play
That way now and they didn’t plan to then?
You can’t do that. You can’t hear that.
You can’t get that sound on a modern guitar
Because the strings don’t stretch.
Because the pickups are wound on a machine
Because smaller Oriental hands fit inside a hollow body
And yours don’t, or not so well.
Because so many things changed
When they made it in Mexico or Korea or China
And all the time you thought it was about the music
When really it was about the bottom line.
What is it about that sound?
The jangly guitar in Tom Petty songs
That echoes something from the sixties
The decade Tom’s living now. When did that happen? Exactly how?
Remember that boy with the thin face
And a bullet bandolier? singing about how it don’t really matter
If she don’t or if she do?
Long time since Tom’s wallet let that happen, probably.
That sweet whine of Clapton’s SG or Knopfler’s Strat when he sang
About the Sultans of Swing, and Swing that swung back when
There was nobody here but us chickens.
This is what we’ve always done, it’s what we do,
We idolise a past we never knew.
The Stratocaster name came from the stratosphere
Back when they’d just started going there
Back when a guy from Leiston airfield broke the sound barrier.
Hey, give me a major chord, Marketing’s got something here.
So Tom Petty played the ‘60s jangly guitar he grew up with
Or his guitarist did. It wasn’t Tom who played that speed riff
In American Girl. Knopfler had to have a guitar
Built back when blaggers robbed steam trains without a shooter.
Jay Kay played kitsch disco back in ’92, chilling out
To the bump and grind he’d heard in the womb.
But it was mind-filler then, back when Noddy Holder shouted out
‘It’s Christmas’ and every wannabe bad girl copied his spelling,
When cool kids knew the Blue Oyster Cult
Was nothing to do with Greenpeace or Jonestown
Which was nothing to do with
The massacre at Alice’s Restaurant
Or even Greenpeace.
Just
Is this all there is? One big circle
Holding hands like the von Trapp kids?
But maybe better that than saying
If it happened before me
Then it didn’t really happen at all.
So let’s hear it for the Platters and the Ramones,
People stared at the makeup on his face,laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace. The boy in the bright blue jeans jumped on the stage. Lady Stardust sang the songs of darkness and dismay. And it was alright, the band was altogether, yes it was alright, the song went on forever and it was out of sight, really quite Paradise. We sang all night, all night long.
Ok, doing stand-up poetry (yes I know it’s not real poetry) gigs on the Suffolk coast isn’t quite like heading the bill at the Hammesmith Odeon and I can’t quite squeeze into that off the shoulder Mr Fish dress but now I know the feeling that the song was about.
For fifteen years I did business presentations. I did the Powerpoints, memorised the subject, which was usually marketing research and the details and results of the job we’d done for the clients and got up there on my hind legs. I got a bit of a reputation for being at every conference and it was true. I loved it. It was hard work in a way that a coal-miner or a farmer wouldn’t recognise. We’d fly in somewhere and with my favourite client that owned and launched satellites I’d be picked up by car from my house and driven to the airport. We’d fly Business class and get a decent taxi to a hotel the other end. I hadn’t been to any five star hotels as a guest before that. I got to know them in Amsterdam, Sydney, Hong Kong, the places you see advertised in the Financial Times. We’d get changed, shower, do some sight-seeing and shopping, and do the presentation. Afterwardsyou were expected to party. And talk. And be sociable. Until as the host you were the last man standing. Next day there would be seminars to lead, lunch, sightseeing, presentation, dinner, party. Last day was sightseeing, lunch, airport.
At all times you were expected to look as if you were enjoying yourself. Drinking was encouraged and it was fabulous restaurant bars and free (because the client was paying) five star alcohol. You were almost expected to get off your face, civilly and happily. And God help you if you failed to show for an event the next day.
It was an old-fashioned world and it took its own toll. One person I knew got stage-fright. He got so nervous about presentations that the only way he could do them was to lie down behind the stage curtain before it went up. Otherwise he’d hyperventilate and get the literally paralysing cramps that stop you breathing to regulate the oxygen in your blood which works, but it makes you feel as if you’re having a heart attack. And yes thanks, I’ve had that happen twice in my life, but never because I had to go on stage.
But I still get just a bit nervous before I go on. Always it’s half-way through the previous act, the one before I go on. I get that stomach-clamping feeling and something happens in my neck and I have to think clearly. We were at DP’s in Aldeburgh last night, a nice, friendly place and crowd. I knew lots of people there, I’d played to them before, some were saying how much they were looking forward to my stuff. But it still happens.
It cripples some people. The way I deal with it works for me. I just have a chat with myself, in my head. I say to myself what a friend used to tell her show-jumping daughter. You don’t have to do it. Really. If it’s really that bad, just don’t do it. Nobody’s going to make you do it. It’s perfectly ok. They’ll get by without you, don’t worry about that. Just don’t do it.
And then I tell myself to just shut up. If I wasn’t going to do it there wouldn’t have been any point coming here.
So you get your stuff in order. Feel the mood in the room and decide what you’re going to do to fit the mood. Walk forward, turn to face them and smile. It’ll be ok.
“Some people think that poetry should rhyme but there’s more to words than that…”
I’ve just been harangued. That’s either an Oooooh, Betty moment (no, I don’t know why it was so screamingly funny now either, but it truly was) or something odd is still going on with the stuff I don’t call poetry.
Just saying it can even make it happen, apparently. I’m waiting.
When I first started doing stand-up in pubs three months ago, although it seems like a lot longer than that, I came up with this intro, just to let people know that luckily for them, I hadn’t forgotten my guitar so nobody was going to lend me one.
I called it Words Without Music and I still use it sometimes to introduce the set, mainly because I can remember it, but also because to me at least, it says ‘this is a bit of fun, there might be some serious, even maybe moving themes in the stuff I’m going to be doing, it might make you think but let’s face it, if you want therapy or deep insight I’m not Oliver Sacks.’
Some people say that poetry should rhyme,
But there’s more to words than that.
Sometimes rhyming just produces doggerel at worst;
Very often you could hardly call it verse.
It’s not, let’s be honest, Shakespeare. Is it? Actually, some of Shakespeare’s rhymes were just as crap as that, but I’m not claiming that’s anythingbut what it is, something mildly amusing, to be heard in a pub when you’re out having fun, ’twas mine, ’tis his and will be a slave to thousands. Oh no, I can feel it coming on again! But seriously folks, that’s all it is. Or that one, anyway.
From the first time I’ve done this stuff outside my own kitchen I’ve been surprised by people’s reactions. Total strangers have thanked me for saying some of the things I write about, several people have been near tears and presumably not because it’s so rubbish, although I can’t be sure. I’ve had good-natured heckling which is all part of the fun and heckling from a woman in her eighties who was incensed that I’d called Mothering Sunday Mother’s Day.
“It’s not Mothers Day,” she said, loudly and clearly.
I think you’ll find that’s what today is. madam, I oiled. I didn’t add ‘actually.’ Should have.
“I think you’ll find today is Mothering Sunday,” said someone’s mum, who’d been taken there by her pink-haired daughter specifically to hear my poetry. Which was nice. Especially as I’ve no recollection of ever seeing her daughter before. Email me here if you like. We can you know, talk about poetry. If your mum doesn’t mind.
I’ve had people hammering on my door demanding I don’t perform any more “drivel,” or in fact anything else, anywhere, ever again. But today, Songs Without Music as I call the little intro piece came in for special attention. Another lady came over to steam in.
“You said rhymes were rubbish and a bad thing. And yet you’ve just rhymed prose. Some people at my poetry group are very sensitive. Why do you say the things they do are bad then go and do them?”
Er well, that’s not really exactly what I said. I explained that some of Betjeman’s stuff, love it though I do, is utter tosh, as he was the first to agree, because sometimes, just sometimes, he chases the rhyme to the exclusion of sense. If you don’t agree, read The Young Executive. Which is funny and biting and lovely, but John, please. The rhymes.
I am a young executive, no cuffs than mine are cleaner,
I own a slimline briefcase and I drive the firm’s Cortina.
And who says he was just chasing the rhyme? Me. Because just a couple of lines later the young exec has to have an Aston-Martin, because that’s more in keeping, although not even Betjeman could find anything to rhyme with that.
But rhymes aside, I was bemused. I’ve got used to pierced and shaved-headed people looming up and grabbing my arm and saying ‘thank-you’ when I thought they were going to lamp me. I’m still not used to the idea that anyone gives two monkeys for any opinion they think they can see in my stand-up stuff. Especially when it’s not what I said.
As it was I had to juggle my dry sherry from hand to hand while having no wish to offend provided this stopped quite soon I tried very politely to point out that actually, I hadn’t said that all poetry that rhymes was rubbish, that I was quite surprised anyone gave a toss what I thought about it in the first place and if anyone had the balls to stand up and do poetry then brilliant, and they shouldn’t give much of a good goddamn what anyone who didn’t had to say about it. Except my haranguer was a lady of a certain age and you just can’t, really.
But I’m still quite surprised. Not that people get things wrong. I’m very used to that. Sometimes it’s stuff in their heads. Sometimes it’s the way I say things. Sometimes, to be honest, that’s even deliberate. What surprises me is anyone thinks there’s anything I’ve got to say in stand-up that ought to change their life. I mean, if that’s true it’s about time I wrote something about going back in time and eloping with Kate Bush. Then maybe she’ll come to her senses as well.
After a long time scrabbling around to pay the bills I’ve finally found a paid job that will do that and quite a lot more, allowing me to continue to do the things I like doing. The things I seem to be able to do in a way that people seem to like, and things I’m getting better at.
I went up for the interview a week ago today, a Tuesday. We spent half the interview talking about the shortcomings of rigid processes and a lot of time talking about bicycles.
It was something I’d put on my CV, how one of my ambitions was to afford a Pedersen. What’s a Pedersen? Is this an interview or something?
Long, long ago, before there were even cars, a man called Mr Pedersen was Danish but he had the misfortune to live in Dursley. I know. But let’s get on. He built a bicycle, lots of them, out of wood, sometimes. They weren’t like ordinary bicycles. Instead of one basic rectangle on the slant-shaped frame (look, I didn’t do well at maths at school, ok? I can do it now, pretty well, but I don’t know the names of shapes. Rhomboid? Maybe? Anyway…) with a saddle perched on the top, the Pedersen bicycle has made up of loads of even more slanty rectangles, with much thinner metal tubes holding it all together, with no saddle at all. Instead, the rider half stood, half sat in a leather sling.
You can see the difference.
For lots of reasons, Pedersens turned out a lot faster and more comfortable than the standard ‘safety’ bicycle. Maybe because the rider’s stomach isn’t cramped up so the lungs can expand more easily, maybe because with a straight posture you can get more power out of your thigh muscles and into the pedals – I don’t know. But they won so many races that they were banned from racing, which along with a bit of financial embarassment pretty much finished the company. Mr Pedersen invented a milking machine, being a handy sort and went back to Denmark and there the story might have ended.
Except it rather wonderfully didn’t. Back in about 1970 a Danish blacksmith found one of these old bikes and in the spirit of the times, thought he’d start making them. He opened a workshop (ok, a shed then) in an abandoned military barracks in Copenhagen that people were starting to call Christianaland and did exactly that.
The utterly wonderful Pedersen bicycle I can’t afford.
And people bought them. They weren’t cheap, at about 1,000 Euros each, but they were and are great. I rode one once. So did a friend of mine whose idea of a nice bicycle was one with four wheels and an engine and a heater and a roof and a good CD player and leather seats. She was away for 20 minutes, which made the man in the pub whose bike we’d been talking about more than a bit agitated. She got back and described a route she’d taken that must have been covered about 20% faster than you’d comfortably be able to on a normal bike and trust me, she didn’t do cycle racing.
“I want one of those,’ was the first thing she said as she handed the bike back to the owner.
“I’d like that one, please,’ was the first thing I said in the shop when I found an insulated steel cup with a screw-top lid that will be ideal for the commute immediately after the interview. I’m usually rubbish about interviews, in large part because I often end-up talking about bicycles and things.
Anyway, all this stuff seems to have got me a job. Which means I can now have weekends completely free from worry about how I’m going to afford to go to open mic gigs on Friday and Saturday nights. Ok, I’m going to have to commute, but I’m working on a car/folding bike/train arrangement that I think will work out pretty well, especially as summer’s coming.
Now I’d better get on with polishing shoes and ironing some shirts. And I need some more hangers for them. And I suppose I’d better finish this stage version of the play what I wrote, now that Eastern Angles want a serious look at it with a view to producing it. There’s always something, isn’t there? Wish me luck.
