July 2014 – Writer-insighter

Protection

I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife and a State Trooper knocking in the middle of the night..." — “I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife and a State Trooper knocking in the middle of the night…” Ok, so I didn’t write it. Want a fight about it?

I wrote this last winter. It was freezing and my car was telling me all kinds of bad things, none of which ever happened. The things that did my car had nothing to say about.

Protection

Strap in and turn the key

Check the warning lights,

Sale behind the side impact protection bars,

The crumple zone, the anti-dive seatbelt

The whiplash padding on the head-restraint,

The lights on the dashboard telling me my belt is unfastened,

But I’m reversing as it tells me too.

The mirror’s heating and the black ice warning snowflake

Not showing white on the glass somehow this cold morning

The clamour of the reversing sensor,

Another light to tell me the airbag will work

All of this telling me I won’t get hurt.

All of these coats and gloves and deadlocked doors,

The shatterproof glass, all of this protection

Around me and your empty seat

And still one word from you or

A single glance could rip my heart.

This tender, romantic little poem was inspired by an ad I once saw in the Personals, long before there were things like www.swingingheaven.com that nobody knows about anyway so I don’t know why I mentioned it really.

The ad went on and on and on, about how this poor woman loved her children more than life itself, how she’d been left on her own with them and how she’d never let anyone get between her and her most precious darlings. This was a Personals ad, don’t forget. Maybe not the best place to do all that. Right at the end after she’d bled all over the page, she cracked the best pay-off line I’ve ever heard:

“I’m looking for a man without any baggage.”

Without any sense of irony too, obviously. I hope she ended-up with the American she was looking for. It stuck in my head, the way things do, until I wrote her ad again.

All Of Your S**t

I’m looking for someone without any baggage

I’m a man/woman/couple looking for

A fun reliable person/partner/soulmate,

Someone tall/short and dark/light

Someone funny/serious and adventurous

Who likes staying at home and going out

Just chilling and doing the same things.

They say opposites attract. LOL.

I love my children, my family, my job, my home, my car

I’d lay down my life for them or never forgive them

Or someone for getting between me and them.

I love my pets and I don’t want any ties right now.

I like walking on beaches in the mountains.

I love going on Citybreaks in the countryside.

I want someone to be there for me when I need them

And I can’t handle anything heavy right now.

I want someone to build a future together.

I love having no responsibilities

And caring and going away whenever I like.

I love staying at home. I’m looking for a life partner,

A serious relationship, a one-night stand.

Who knows? Let’s see. Fun.

I’m married, single, divorced, separated,

Just looking and widowed;

It’s complicated. Delete as appropriate.

Or delete me as inappropriate.

Friend me. Chat. TXT. IM me.

Delete my posts on your timeline,

Block my profile and change your privacy settings

Even as you change mine, forever and ever

Until the next time.

Mark me as flagged until the Xs disappears from your MSGS

And quickly then the TXTS get shorter and less often

Until sooner than you thought

On the screen there’s no reply at all

And quite finally, without appeal and irrevocably

You just unfriend me.

So I’m looking for someone without any baggage.

October 2013

Late Flowering Lust

“With brandy-certain aim” described my own technique, once upon a time. It’s not nice. but Betjeman’s poems weren’t about nice. They were about real life, a vision of England much more real than many imagine, a summer’s meadow where the picnic usually has wasps.

So because I like you all so much, here, fantastically but true, is nearly a whole hour of Betjeman set not only to music but to film.

Things to note are my mother at 2:30 (not actually her, but it may as well have been) and the literal dance macabre late at the party.

As for the late-flowering lust stuff, obviously, I couldn’t possibly comment.

And btw, the teddy bear in Brideshead was Betjeman’s. He was nothing like Sebastian n any other respect, although perhaps he wished he was.

Me and Edith Sitwell

It was just a name I’d heard, the way you do. One of The Pancakes turned me on to her, as we used to say, when it didn’t mean that.

“You should hear her stuff on You Tube. It’s like the stuff you do.”

edith sitwell — “Apparently my stuff’s like Carl Bennett’s.”

Hmm. I’m not sure Still Falls The Rain is anything like the stuff I do, frankly. I can feel the pain in it. I can’t go along with the thing that says ‘my invisible friend says somehow all this is alright.’ Mrs Miniver I can handle. Mrs Masochist not so much.

I thought maybe she had something to do with the Mitfords and all the rest of those semi-mythical people the British idolise primarily because they’re rich, have dysfunctional families and usually have something wrong with them. It’s our national obsession, that and living in the kind of stone house that points to slavery or tobacco. Of course, if you want the really biggest, most absolutely Yah kind of house, sorry, hise, you have to kill lots of foreigners. Absolutely loads of them if you want something like Blenheim Palace. Apparently the Duke of Marlborough went off to war, his wife built the house (and yes, me too. I’d really, really like to have seen her with a hod full of bricks over her shoulder, or having a sausage sarnie while she read Ye Sunne, wiping the brown sauce off her hands on the leg of her jeans) and he shagged her in his riding boots when he got back. Although why she was wearing his riding boots instead of her own was never made clear.

But anyway, Edith Sitwell ticked all the boxes. Allegedly. A hundred and one years on and we seem to have a lot in common. “Sitwell published poetry, some of it abstract and set to music. With her dramatic style and exotic costumes, she was sometimes labelled a poseur, but her work was also praised.”

My step-sister lived around the corner from where Edith lived, admittedly at a different time, so another tenuous link there, I think you’d have to agree. Apart from the rich thing. I’ve never had the knack. Like all True Brits, nor did Edith Sitwell. She inherited it. Oldest child and only daughter of a baronet who was fantastically “an expert on genealogy and landscaping,” two of the most irrelevant things you could ever aspire to be an expert in. Her titled mother claimed descent from the Plantagenets, but rather more medieval money seemed to have come with her ladyship than attached itself to a friend of mine who grew up in Farnborough who equally claims descent from them.

Edith ticked the dysfunctional family box pretty well, being locked into a metal cage to straighten her spine, which she doubted was ever bent in the first place. She could probably knuckle-bump Eminem too, whose mother pretended he had something wrong with him other than just hating her, something any normal male teenager is supposed to do anyway. Unlike Eminem’s mum and rather to his disappointment, obviously, she ended up in a wheelchair with Marfan Syndrome and died of a brain haemorrhage

So me, Edith Sitwell and Eminem. We’ve got a lot in common. Maybe that’s why the comment I hear about my stuff is it’s good. You do know it’s insane, don’t you. But it’s good. And I can live with that. Unlike Poetry Voice.

Unhappening

After work, the happy volunteers gathered on top of the tower. Quite. Some nights, anyway.

Long, long ago when if not the world then at least I was young, or younger, anyway, I lived on a kibbutz. You sort of had to at my school if you’d been on the sailing team.

Yes, I know how that sounds. Thanks.

It wasn’t that posh. We had two Enterprises and two Mirrors, both types wooden dinghies that might have been made in someone’s garage and many of them were. We sailed on a lake that had been a gravel pit next to Westbury railway station. We had two teachers looking after us, both of them a bit like the kids who ended-up sailing, nice, but none of us really fitted in with the school. The female teacher had been through a divorce from another member of staff. We knew something wasn’t right when we saw the obviously not happy couple arrive at school one morning in their (probably his, in those days) Escort Mexico or whatever it was that blokes having second thoughts went and bought on HP after they’d grown a Zapata moustache. They parked and got out and kissed briefly before they each went their separate ways to their different classes.

Just as a tip, if you want to convince IIIa everything is fine and dandy in your marriage, maybe not both wipe your lips simultaneously as you turn away. It stays with me still, that symbol of a gritted teeth let’s-keep-this-civilised break-up in progress. Hanging on in quiet desperation might have been the English way once. Times were changing.

The other teacher was another misfit, one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. Someone you could trust completely. When one of the other pupils’ father keeled over dead it was this teacher who stepped in quietly as someone who was always there. You didn’t mess him about. You didn’t even want to, because he was totally fair. Unlike the other PE teacher, who was such an utter arse that he spent his lunchtime driving around the town looking through pub windows to see who was where and who shouldn’t be (some of us were eighteen and there wasn’t a school rule about not going to pubs), the sailing PE teacher was just straight down the line. He was usually smiling and quiet. I think I saw him smoking a couple of times. Certainly he didn’t bother asking stupid questions about why when the dinghies went the other side of the island they apparently all hit a headwind and huge clouds of Old Holborn rolled over the lake. At least. But then, he didn’t need to prove anything. He’d been a paratrooper in The War.

Sorry, I’ll type that again. The good PE teacher, the un-ostentatious non-arse one, the one who smiled, had been a paratrooper in the war. Not Northern Ireland Parachute Regiment beating up kids with sticks. Arnhem. D-Day. Unimaginably out in front. You don’t get much more rock than that, really. He probably gave the other one an inferiority complex just by turning up.

So anyway, as nominal Captain of the sailing team it was my sacred duty to go to kibbutz after school. After I left, you understand. It would have been too far to get back every morning, in those days.

I went out with Project 67. I went up to that London for the interview and found people with Walther PPKs stuck down their belt in an office in St Johns Wood hidden behind what looked like a brick wall and clearly wasn’t, all covered by CCTV. It wasn’t now. They only had CCTV on James Bond films back then. James Bond films and spook cover offices in St Johns Wood. It was my first taste of ‘we can do what we like.’ I got more familiar with that as the next few months rolled on. I didn’t know then that the .22 Walther PPK was a favourite Mossad tool for when words just weren’t enough.

I went out there for about two months. I was 19. It seemed a lot longer, but things do when a month is a much bigger proportion of the life you’ve had so far. Revivim was a pile of nothing in the middle of the Sinai desert. It was nothing like the catalogue of lies we’d been told to get us out there. In writing in my brochure was stuff about how you could all get together and borrow a kibbutz car and go into town. There were no kibbutz cars. ‘Town’ was Be’er Sheba, 36 km away and apart from the bar at the bus station there wasn’t anything to do there except not buy the green tobacco that looked like dope but wasn’t in the market and look at the beggars with twisted legs where they sold the live chickens. It wasn’t much like Trowbridge at all, somehow.

They saved the biggest lie for the night the kibbutz was attacked. We knew there were armed guards around every night. Because of TV we pretty much knew what a full magazine of 9mm going off sounded like, but it wasn’t a sound we’d expected to hear as we didn’t have a TV. We all stopped what we were doing and piled out of our huts to stand there illuminated in the parachute flares that were drifting down. Our PE teacher would have told us to get back inside and lie on the floor, the same way I’d tell people now, but he wasn’t there.

There wasn’t any more gunfire. Some older people from the kibbutz self-importantly turned up with Uzi sub-machine guns in their hands, rounded us up and marched us off without any explanation. What’s happening? Nothing. Where are we going? The shelter. What shelter?

Good question, as it turned out. We were all marched down some steps behind a locked steel door on the tennis court, where it turned out the brick hut wasn’t a toolshed after all, but the top of a flight of steep stairs. We all sat there for about an hour. What’s happening? Still nothing.

Eventually we were sent back to our huts. What’s happening? Nothing. Everyone wasn’t talking about it at breakfast. The volunteers were. The people who lived on the kibbutz weren’t. Even when you asked them directly.

So what happened last night?

What do you mean?

We all had to go to the shelter.

There is no shelter.

The gunfire.

There was no gunfire.

The parachute flares? The lights in the sky?

You were dreaming. Nothing happened.

After about an hour we were all sent back to bed. It’s safe. What is? Nothing.

After about two weeks someone found out what had happened. The kibbutz guards that night were fifteen years old. Apparently it was a really good idea to give fifteen year olds loaded sub-machine guns to stick in the front basket on their bicycles. It was night-time, nothing was happening because it never did unless you went spying on who was using the old huts who shouldn’t have been but hey, you’re fifteen and you’ve got an Uzi. Obviously the best thing to do is check the safety catch is on. Not by feeling it with your thumb. Not by taking your hand off the pistol-grip and making sure the web of your fingers isn’t pressing into the back of the handle. No. You’re fifteen. So you hold the thing firmly, (disengaging the grip safety) and pull the trigger. And before you can get your finger off the trigger, because who would have thought that would happen, 30 rounds of 9mm have streaked across the sky at 1200 feet per second.

But luckily, nobody thought it. Because they were kibbutz people. And kibbutz people don’t make mistakes. So luckily it never happened at all. Except it did. Just like the two Arab villages which were bulldozed to make way for the kibbutz.

28%

Dear Chinese people,

Thank-you. I mean, it’s really, really flattering that you like my stuff so much that 28.something percent of all the visits to my website are from China.

It’s truly humbling that my modest efforts to entertain people with posts about Germany and poetry and historically not shagging who I want to or not enough or not any more find their way all around the world to the high-rises of Canton and little thatched houses by a river all that way away.

It’s really nice that you take an interest. No, really it is.

But you aren’t, are you? You really aren’t into my Songs Without Music concept. You don’t really care about the Eidelweiss Pirates or Milorg or White Rose or bicycles (you’re getting rid of those) or any of my other obsessions I litter this site up with.

So WTF is it you actually WANT here? You never leave a comment. You certainly never buy my books. You don’t even charter a plane and come to my gigs, and there are certainly enough of you to make that an economic proposition.

You’re spying, aren’t you? You’re not even real people, just web bots trawling through every new post that goes on WordPress from anybody at all, looking to see if there’s something you can steal. It’s ok. My government wants to roll over and let you tickle its tummy in case you want to buy more stuff they’re giving away, so they won’t be doing anything about it.

So dear 28.7% of all the visitors to this site, please feel free. Immerse yourselves in dim memories and recreations and filterings and yearnings for people you never knew, people who don’t actually exist outside the prism of my creating them. Alternatively you could get off your collective farm arses and do something yourselves. But getting a web-bot to do your scamming is probably a bit easier, isn’t it?

Be lucky. Oh and stop killing the tigers. Eating them doesn’t give you a bigger cock after all.

Poetry Voice

It’s always put me off, and not just me. That pompous ‘listen to me, this is Culture,’ schtick that always reminds me of Kenneth Williams playing his best roles, the waspish ageing queen desperately trying to hide everything behind a veneer of respectability, as if being who you are wasn’t respectable; the English tragedy, that if you were gay it wasn’t just not respectable but you were going to jail for it if it frightened the horses.

I wasn’t and am not gay, but I’m old enough to remember teachers and church people who looking back now, had a lot more in common with Kenneth Williams’s pastiches than they ever did with my life. Back then I thought it was – they were – about having more money than we did. But it wasn’t, or not entirely. It was about being afraid, afraid that however much money you had, one word, one accidentally public peck on the cheek, one hand on another’s shoulder a little too long and you were going to the Big House and nobody decent would ever speak to you again.

If we’ve done nothing else (and I won’t even bother saying ‘discuss’) then at least, at the very, very least, we’ve stopped doing that within the span of my lifetime. And that’s got to count for something.

So here it is:

Poetry Voice

All my life I’ve tried to avoid it;

At school, on the radio, standing here doing it,

The sound of ‘listen to me, this is important

And cultural and noble and pure and true

Because I’m doing Poetry Voice.’

Just for you, dear audience. Wherever you are.

They’re all long words, drawn out vowel sounds and pauses

Sometimes in the most

Unlikely places and words like stentorian

And o’er and appeals to the muse.

And maybe it’s me.

I saw an elephant fly and made a rubber band

But I never saw a Muse. Not once.

I’ve walked o’er dale and hill

But I never saw a daffodil except in someone’s garden.

That’s Poetry Voice – it’s about chasing the rhymes and using words

That nobody’s used since the start of time like this and I don’t:

The sea-birds scream’d as they wheel’d round,
And there was joyaunce in their sound.

Joyaunce? Are you absolutely sure that’s what it was?

I walked the field where Coleridge was lost as a boy.

I did this. I went there.

And that’s what it is. A field. It didn’t fill me with joy somehow.

There’s nothing there. Not even chickens.

The words do it or they don’t.

And the best thing you can do

When you’re standing up here saying these things,

Is cross your fingers and hope your own voice

Doesn’t get in the way, doesn’t put itself

Between the words

And people’s hearts.

You have to assume they have minds.

In fact you don’t. That’s what Poetry Voice is all about,

An appeal to higher senses, tickets on the door,

Volvos in the parking bays, Day-glo vests on the ushers

Guiding you to your aisle, spectral in the gleam of the stage lights

White hair and false teeth flaring in the ultra-violet light.

So if I should die think only this of me

That in some far corner of a foreign bar

I’ll be standing behind a microphone,

Still too lazy to learn my own words,

Still so rocknroll that I have to wear spectacles

To read these songs, trying to right these wrongs

That really, nobody cares about.

Except you’re all here, listening,

So maybe part of that’s wrong.

But I’m still not doing Poetry Voice.

It’s a guy thing

For about 400 years or more, any man who wanted to look clean shaven had to shave the same way, with a straight blade. There weren’t any safety razors or electrics or Bics. And yes, thank-you, I do actually know it’s a trade name and so is Hoover, so don’t get cute when you know what I mean. There weren’s any cut-throat razors either, because there was never any such thing until Frederick and Oto Kampfe started lying about them to sell disposable razor blades in 1880, building on the 1847 Henson patent, which went on rather disturbingly about common hoes. Even today Wikipedia (surprise!!) repeats the same tired old meme about straight-blades:

“The initial purpose of these protective devices was to reduce the level of skill needed for injury-free shaving, thereby reducing the reliance on professional barbers for providing that service and raising grooming standards.”

Meditation aids: Swedish steel blade and a badger brush. OK. I know. It was a present, alright? I know…….

So many Thatcherite plus-points in such a short sentence, and all ostensibly about shaving. Except as with most things in life, it’s much, much wider than it looks.

Let’s start with reducing the level of skill. Always seen as a massive bonus, it’s the next part that’s the really big lie snuck in there while you were thinking about people like Thomas Helliker. The bizarrely named King Camp Gillette whose parents must have really, really not wanted him at all patented his double-edged disposable razor in 1904. In the First World War he got a contract to supply the US Army with his razors and each soldier was allowed to keep his razor if he survived. Most of the three million Americans involved did and suddenly created a market not just for razors but much more important for a manufacturer, a demand for a new blade at least once a week. Gillette invented high-tempered steel litter.

Some older American houses still have a steel box set in the bathroom wall, the place to dump your old blunt blades. It’s not openable; in tune with the disposability of the blades, they thought that by the time the blade box was full the house would be disposable too. See any snags with this reasoning so far? One planet. Don’t spend it all at once.

So far as I know the German army issued straight-blades through World War Two, but the British Army had already switched. Within not very long, most men had forgotten two things almost every man had known for hundreds of years; how to wash his face and how to sharpen a straight blade. Obviously too, everyone was spending more on disposable blades and calling it saving money. A brand-new straight blade will cost from around £60 on up. The most expensive I’ve seen was nearly £800 and it will give the same shave as the cheaper one. The look of it was a different thing altogether. The cheaper one will last the same length of time as the expensive one too: the rest of your life. You’ll spend £60 on the cheapest disposables in the first year.

Reducing consumer reliance on anyone skilled, anyone who actually knows anything, anyone who actually looks after you even if you do have to pay them for it is always another neo-Con obsession. You shouldn’t BE looked after. You should scurry around in the dim light of a winter’s morning, splashing your stupid unloved face with cold water before you scrape up and down with a three-day old plastic Bic before you get out of the door with a piece of toast still sticking out of your mouth, all ready to spend another day commuting and working and earning and consuming. WTF do you want looking after for? Don’t you know why you’re even ON this planet in the first place?

And raising grooming standards. Mrs Thatcher was always very keen on high grooming standards. She was quite keen on saying things that weren’t true either (‘we don’t talk to terrorists’ just for one) and that’s a great one. How scraping your face with a plastic disposable is evidence of raised grooming standards is one of those great mysteries. Like if the IRA had plenty of people ready to die for the cause, how come the Brighton Bomb didn’t get its prime target?

Anyway. Sweeney Todd was a barber in London who was reputed to cut his victim’s throats and dispose of the bodies by turning them into pie fillings. More lies here, I’m afraid. There never was a Sweeney Todd, outside Victorian melodrama. If you actually did cut someone’s throat with a razor after the most stupid name going, which is perfectly possible but there is – trust me – no way you could possibly do it by accident, then there would be literally fountains of blood splattering six feet up the walls. Unless it was really, really foggy people might notice, just a bit. And even then they’d smell it anyway.

For me, that’s the silliest part. I’ve always but always cut myself with ‘safety’ razors. I hardly ever do with a straight blade. The idea that you could cut your throat is just stupid. You could. But not by accident. The idea alone stops you doing it, because when you start off you’ll cut yourself once. And you won’t even feel it. That’s the odd part. You’ll see the blood bright red through the lather or if you’ve been utterly stupid enough to run a finger along the blade to see if it’s sharp you’ll have seen but again not felt that actually, bizarrely, things are called razor-sharp because that’s what razors generally are and the thought alone sharpens you up of a morning, a bit like cycling or riding a motor-cycle. Shaving the old way isn’t a passive thing. You have to be involved. It’s not about choice.

First you need a decent razor, so you’ll do the thing everyone does and waste more than a good razor would have cost buying cheap crap ones off eBay. The only ones you’ll find at boot sales usually have chunks missing out of the blade where someone tried to sharpen a pencil or use it as a penknife. If you actually used one like this they say men with scars have more character, so it’s not all bad. Except it will have been and you definitely will have felt that.

Once you’ve got your razor you need to sharpen it and this is where the serious Me-Time comes in. Wierd stuff happens to the edge of the blade on a razor. After you shave the metal grows, or at least it uncurls from the slight bend the whiskers put in it before they got shaved off. Trust me on this. Not a foot or so like a magic sword, but at microscope level. If the ultra-utter edge of the blade has curled over then obviously it’s going to be blunt, so you have to rub it on a leather strop, pulling away from you with the sharp bit of the blade towards you, then turn it over and pull it back towards you. You’ll see why that’s important about now. But you can’t do that for about 24 hours after you’ve shaved with it or the edge won’t be right. Which is why rich folk and barbers used to have seven razors, one for every day of the week.

If you’re really into it (and today you’ll have to be because you won’t find an old-fashioned barber to do it for you because they all have to use disposable straight blades) you’ll buy a stone and hone the razor on that every couple of months. And in between use another leather strop with abrasive paste on it between times, not forgetting to dry it off each time you use it and oil it if you’re not going to use it for a couple of days. By which time, left alone, sometimes it’ll just go blunt anyway. Because it will.

The shaving part is more involved too. You need to get your face warm. Barbers do it with hot towels and it feels great. Soothing. Relaxing. As if you’re rich and someone cares. Then wash your face with soap and wash it all off. Then wash your face with soap and don’t wash it off, but lather up some different shaving soap with a brush and put that on. You’ve seen it on the films. And don’t forget to get the brush nice and hot first. You’ll notice the difference. Then do it. Use a decent mirror and it’ll be fine. Don’t lay it flat on your skin. Don’t put the blade at right angles to the cut. And for God’s sake don’t ever cut in the direction of the blade, because you’ll go straight through to your teeth before you know what’s happened. Think about that and you’ll never go wrong.

Then do it again. Then do it again the other direction. And dab what soap there is off, then cold water wash and moisturise and then perhaps some aftershave. And feel like a king, centred, focussed and truly, definitely sharper. Because you’ve been concentrating. Doing the thing you’re not supposed to do in a big consumer society. Not the not-buying-disposable-stuff every couple of days.

You just did the really bad consumer thing. For about fifteen minutes you shut everything else out. You meditated. You just focussed entirely on you.

It’s a new day. It’s a new life. And it feels good.

A rose by any other

Words don’t mean anything you want them to mean, unless you happen to be Tweedle Dum and/or Dee, (not to be confused with Simon Dee, obviously, or Cyril Henty-Dodd, as he answered to in court. I know. I’m really sorry about that too, but you know, I didn’t do it) and/or Tony Blair or someone like that, the kind of person who says God wanted them to tell lies.

Which isn’t me, really. So on the basis that words do actually matter I’m trying to find a name for the stand-up stuff I do, and a stage name to go with it. Maybe my own name is fine. I don’t know.

Inga Haselmann. — Songs without music. Some people like them.

SoI thought I’d ask the audience, or the proportion of audience that goes on Facebook and the interwebs, anyway.

Click just here to go to my fabulous survey.

I’m on at the Golden Key, Snape tonight, at Steven Lays Open Mic night hosted by the utterly yummy Inga Haselmann.

See you there.

Petta Fiesta

This weekend I’m doing something I don’t usually do: I’m going to a festival. Last time I went to a festival was to Stonehenge and it was rubbish. I was 18. I’d just done A Levels. I hitched there and met my mate Phil and listened to a band called Here & Now, who seemed to be the worst bits of Hawkwind and Gong joined together. There was another band we listened to as well, Alternative TV. It was sunny so we sat on the ground and wondered if you’d actually die if you ate anything being cooked there. We’d brought some cider so we drank that and fell sort of asleep for a bit. I woke up staring into a naked woman I’d never met before who wanted to trade an orange for cigarette papers. The snag was I didn’t have any cigarette papers.

We talked to people called things like Maggot who didn’t seem to have quite as many teeth as they ought to and whose conversational abilities appeared limited. We didn’t know or particularly care if that was a temporary thing or not.

We didn’t want to eat anything there, didn’t see where you could get a drink and when we did we didn’t like plastic beakers to drink out of (yeah, like ecological, man) and generally didn’t know what to do there so we went home.

We weren’t the world’s best festie goers. But we didn’t buy cheap tents then leave them there either, which seems to be the ‘alternative’ thing to do these days. Right on. One planet. Don’t spend it all at once.

But anyway. I’m going back to a festival, Petta Fiesta. I’m hoping its going to be different, because I’m on stage with Jan Pulsford, doing a set at 10:30 Saturday night. Just like last time I will be mostly sober, because I’m driving back afterwards. Contrary to my life plans my car doesn’t seem to be noticeably better than the one I wasn’t able to borrow to get to Stonehenge.

If you can’t get to Petta you can hear That Sound, something I might do as part of a set here on Soundcloud. Enjoy.

neither of us