Black horse, white horse and a Sunbeam Rapier.

I went to the FolkEast festival last weekend, not least because it was walking distance from my house. I haven’t been to a festival for years, and more fool me. One of the first acts I saw there was Lisa Knapp, who had a four piece band behind her and she was sublime. I went and bought her CD from the information tent as soon as her set was over.

13LisaKnapp1
Lisa Knapp. What’s not to like?

If you haven’t heard her, she sounds like this. And looks like this. She’s got a powerful voice, a little bit Kate Bush, a little bit Bjork, but newer, more now somehow and much as it pains me to say it, I think she’s actually better than Kate. If the entire music thing hadn’t gone fractal I’d have said she’d be bigger than Kate Bush in a year or two, but I’m not sure that’s how things work these days.

What I particularly like about her stuff is the way she explores a dark side of music, or life, or folk tales. Years ago I read about a man who went to get the papers one morning and found, rather to his surprise, a woman in what he presumed to be a shroud, dancing a few inches above the pavement in a perfectly ordinary street of terraced houses. She was still there when he came back from the shop, avoiding her side of the road, so he didn’t go that way again. And you hear these stories and think why? Why would anyone make that up? What would they do that for, exactly, if they didn’t want to get sectioned?

So when I heard Lisa Knapp singing Black Horse I was surprised by the power of her voice but also by the darkness she was flirting with, so much so that she turns a conversation/analogy between Life and Death, darkness and light into a lullaby. You can see it here. I watched it half an hour ago and I’ve still got chills running up my back because of something someone once told me.

I bought a car once from a friend’s girlfriend’s grandfather. It was an old car but he hadn’t exactly run this Mk V Sunbeam Rapier into the ground. He was out driving one night, with his wife, when just like an old joke, someone ran past him. Which was odd but fine in and of itself, expect he was doing about 60 mph and the man ran straight past the car in the same direction. Then it got odder, because the man flipped around and started running backwards, staring into the car as he ran a couple of feet in front of the bonnet. The old man braked, as well you might, but not in time or at least what he thought was time, because the man ran through the car. He could see him as he came through the dashboard, through the gap between the seats and out of the back of the car. The old man drove to the next town and found a police station to tell them what happened. They said it had happened before, there.

And again, why would you make that up? What would possess anyone to make that up and go to the police to tell them about it? I have no idea, whether it’s true, why anyone would make it up or any of it. But Lisa Knapp singing Black Horse in her video took me right back there to the day I heard that story and reminded me how I felt, driving that car at night. Nothing happened. How could it?

Share Button

Customer Service

It’s BT. Obviously

“Thank-you for holding. We are very busy at the moment and your call will be answered as soon as possible.”

I don’t have a choice. I have to hold. I don’t need thanks for it. It’s pointless. I have no option. I can’t phone anyone else about this. And after waiting 24 hours for a call back to explain what I have to do to fix your fault, thanks don’t come into it.

It’s BT. I have no broadband. It’s been patchy but I’ve been told well, you live in Suffolk, what do you expect? Same as mobile phones. Let’s face it; it’s all retirees, the kind of people who make their own wooden folding chairs to go to the Snape Poetry Prom. Do you think they give a shit about no broadband? Only once a year, when the Saga car insurance comes due.

I am clearly not very busy, because I am expected to sympathise with the other, better people who are. You can tell they’re better. They’re busy. They’ve not sitting around complaining about things, shirking. They’re getting on, busily, with their tidy hair and their clean white shirts. Not like the slackers and shirkers and Moaning Minnies who frankly are just a drain on things with all their negative attitudes, as customer service may as well be called now.

So far it’s taken one entire day for my call to be answered. When I ask why this is, or what BT intend to do about it, I’m simply put in another queue, the one for people who ask difficult and therefore stupid questions. Like, why did I have to wait a day for a callback? Why when I re-structured my day to be at the house (essential according to BT) between 5pm and 6pm, notified to me by three separate texts and not really that convenient, especially considering I phoned at 20:00 the day before) was there, how shall we say, no phone call at all?

Why, given it’s obviously possible to answer my call at once if you had enough staff and gave a shit, wasn’t it answered for over half an hour? Why, BT, don’t you know how English works? Why when you were privatised in what, 1986 or something, and people have been born, had children and died in that time, when privatising your useless service was supposed to increase competition, as every parliamentarian will swear on a stack of Bibles, is it next to impossible to get any broadband connection that doesn’t use your useless service? Why?

Here’s what happened.

Dear BT, I realise you don’t give a shit about it because last time I mentioned it you put me on hold until my mobile battery ran out, but I’ll tell you anyway.

Yesterday I had to do something online. Quite an important thing, because I’d said I would so I had to. But no Internet. I phoned BT to see if there was anything wrong with the line. Everyone here knows you get slower Internet when it rains but BT say you don’t so that’s that and you’re a liar, but this wasn’t slow, it was not happening. BT, or the irritating Scottish voice BT thinks calms people down who wouldn’t have needed calming down if BT’s shit monopoly service wasn’t so utterly shit, told me there was nothing wrong with the line. Oddly, for a Scottish voice, it didn’t say ‘pal,’ when it told me there wisnae anything wrang, but if youse keep on there med well be.

So I got in the car and drove half an hour to go and buy a new modem. The old one was at least eight years old and I measured that by moving houses, so it might have been older. There’s nothing in a modem I can see how it could break, exactly, but maybe it just gets bored, or there’s a flesh tone counter or something. So anyway. New modem. It probably wasn’t BT’s fault that when I left Staples and got into the car and turned the key it just went click so I had to read Angela’s Ashes (really, hasn’t this all been done a bit, you know, before? Really? Sure and Catholicly begorrah it’s the drink and the rain to be sure and the past is another country and besoides, the pig was dead?) for two hours while Ipswich’s finest sashayed out to get chips and come back again until the AA turned up to sell me a new car battery, one of those things guv, that’s how it goes.

Get home. Install new modem. Still nothing. Phone BT. It’s not the line. It’s the exchange. We’ll call you. Tomorrow, when it would suit you. You can stay in all day or we can call you in the evening, let’s say five o’clock. So let’s say that indeed. Cycle to Aldeburgh. Buy a book and cheese and bread and tomatoes and lie on the beach in the sun for three hours, dozing and reading and then interrupt what has been a fairly lovely Saturday so far to get back for BT. But it’s hot and I’m thirsty so maybe as I’m literally cycling past the door anyway time to drop into a friend’s pub where there’s been perhaps the teensiest misunderstanding this morning but that’s nothing to do with BT to have a pint of wheat beer, but my army friend is there with his mother, so three pints down before I’m told it makes my other friend, the not army one who runs the place, feel ‘a bit weird’ if I’m there as a customer so would I mind not being, call you later, let’s go out after the lunch service tomorrow. Get home.

Nothing on the mobile. Nothing on the landline. Phone BT. Same message. Hang on for forty minutes until I eventually get through to someone. Who asks all of the questions I’ve dutifully tapped into the set of menus I needed to go through to get to talk to her, then can’t answer the question I want answering, when BT are going to sort this out and why after 28 years is their service still so utterly shit and there isn’t any competition? I’d settle for just the answer to the first one, to be honest, but of course, she doesn’t know. It’s not her job to know. I don’t know what her job is, but it isn’t to help customers. Because she can’t. It’s not her fault. She’s got no way of helping the customers. That’s why it can’t be any part of her job specification. What her job seems to be is winding up customers who are stupid enough to pay BT to phone BT to complain about BT so that they pay BT more to stay on the line having more things to complain about BT to BT about.

BT’s service, to use a technical term, is a pile of shit. And because this is a free market and nothing to do with the government, and because it’s such a free market that every single broadband provider in the UK has to use BT’s lines unless they live in Hull, tough. See above.

 

Share Button

Dear Ebay

Please, if you’re going to email me in English, please learn to speak it in a way that doesn’t patronise me and tell lies at the same time. Thank-you.

No, this simply is not true. I made EBay aware of at least six fake ‘dovo’ razors. They were all still there for sale.

I also do not understand how you/Ebay can pretend my listing was removed “for my own safety.” What danger was I in, exactly?

My lack of understanding is this: Why is it ok to list fake razors? Why won’t EBay ever do anything about removing and banning sellers who repeatedly list fake razors?

I am sick and tired of Ebay’s sanctimonious and hypocritical attitude. Look at this listing

Click to view larger image and other views
  • Cut-Throat-Razor-Damascus-Steel-Jeffery-Straight-Grooming-Vintage-west-Todd-dovo
  • Cut-Throat-Razor-Damascus-Steel-Jeffery-Straight-Grooming-Vintage-west-Todd-dovo
  • Cut-Throat-Razor-Damascus-Steel-Jeffery-Straight-Grooming-Vintage-west-Todd-dovo

Have one to sell? Sell it yourself

Cut Throat Razor Damascus Steel Jeffery Straight Grooming Vintage west Todd dovo

It is totally fake. The same way it was fake yesterday, the same way it was fake when I first reported it. Ebay refuses to do anything about it. The word dovo is listed clearly.

Dovo is a registered company in Germany. Every single one of their blades has the word DOVO stamped on it. This does not. This means it has nothing to do with the DOVO factory. This listing is fake. This seller sells fakes. Every one of his razors that says ‘dovo‘ in the ad is an ad for a fake. And I have told you this, by email,  repeatedly.

WHY WON’T EBAY DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?

I don’t expect a real answer because Ebay can do no wrong in its own eyes. I have been scammed out of money by fake buyers and Ebay’s attitude is simply a) I have to sort it out myself (b) tough.

Get these fake razors off eBay. Get the fake seller off Ebay for good, as he never sells anything else. Until then, please do not lecture me about my safety.

Best regards and my eternal hatred,

Me.

And I’m not even going to bother mentioning the fake ‘damascus’ steel which a pound to a penny is just rubbish metal etched with acid, not fine metal folded, hammered, folded and hammered hundreds of times so the edge when it’s sharpened is a sharks’ mouth of tiny ridges of steel. For #29. Sure it is, eBay. Sure it is.

Share Button

We are with ISIS in Syria.

This morning the Church of England has condemned the Prime Minister, David Cameron,’s ‘incoherent’ Middle East foreign policy. They didn’t say he was one of a small number of public school boys so far out of their depth that Boris Johnson looks like a global statesman in comparison but they didn’t really need to. These are desperate times. Don’t you know there’s a war on? There usually is, after all.

So what about ISIS? They’re a threat to our whole way of life, apparently, the same way everything that happens in the Middle East is supposed to be a threat to our way of life. They behead criminals, which is what about 45% of the UK wants to do anyway, so that’s obviously unacceptable. We’d kill people a nice way. Out of sight, for a start, so we don’t have to see what we paid someone to do for us. They’ve left thousands of people stuck on a mountain without water. We’ve sent them phone chargers though, so at least they can see what Jeremy Clarkson has to say about it on Twitter. When I was a boy American comics were full of cartoons about muscle-bound GIs stuck on a hill until the crates of chewing gum and ammunition floated down out of the sky to let them break out, take Berlin and get on back home  to Marylou-Anne gahdammit. The comic writers didn’t forsee the ‘chutes opening and grateful Yazidi refugees taking time out of their hectic schedule of despairing and dying of typhoid to pick up some style tips from Wallpaper online.

So we should be doing everything we can to stop ISIS, shouldn’t we? Obviously. But we didn’t. We did the opposite. We protected them. This isn’t my opinion. This is what Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said. He’s a Republican, from a rootin’ tootin’ right-to-carry state, the kind of place where if you’re out driving of a night time and see a gopher at the side of the road it’s acceptable behaviour to stop your car, open the glove box, pull out your .38, get out and shoot it. It’s about the size of a long rabbit. It doesn’t even bite people, which in the circumstances seems foolish. I’ve met people from Kentucky who’ve done exactly this. Shot small gophers, not bite people you understand. They were normal, nice people who were fun to be around. Apart from the guns and death thing and back then I liked guns a lot.

But anyway, why were we with ISIS? Because they hated Al-Queada. We hated Al-Queada, which was presented to us as The Enemy, the same way the guys in the grey uniforms and different shaped hats were throughout the twentieth century, rather than the loose alliance of pissed-off foreign people who thought they’d been sold down the river by the West after they were paid to fight the Russians in Afghanistan then told thanks guys, see you but not if we see you first when the Russians went home.  We armed the mujadheen in Afghanistan all through the 1980s and 90s. We gave them Stinger missiles to shoot down Russian helicopters. We gave them a bounty if they could bring-in a Russian SVD sniper rifle There are so many references to all of this on the web that I really haven’t got the time or the inclination to cite them. Do it yourself. That’s what Google’s for.

Or you could do what David Cameron does. Make your opinion on what the” facts” are or what to do on who makes the loudest noise in the media. And remember, the media lies. And lies. And lies. They’ve got chemical weapons. It doesn’t matter that we sold them to them. They’ve got weapons of mass destruction. Like the atom bombs that Israel has which it’s rude to mention, apart from the fact the baddies didn’t have WMDs at all. That was just made-up. They’ve got missiles which could strike our bases within 45 minutes. Everyone wanted to think that meant places like Purbright and Warminster, not Cyprus at the very outside, and they couldn’t meet that timeframe anyway, and that’s what things like Iron Dome anti-missile missiles are for in the first place and we won’t hear a word against that, will we? Most of all though, they’re trying to destroy our way of life.

What does that even mean? If it means that some Middle East countries might put a price on the oil we’ve built our entire economy on, which was stupid, that we don’t find convenient or acceptable then our wonderful free markets should be able to sort the problem out. Markets are efficient, after all. The most perfect of all economies. So why shouldn’t we pay four times more for what’s left of the oil? Because like any spoiled child, we don’t want to. And it’s not fair. What we should do is go round the housing estates where there aren’t any jobs and get the brightest kids there to put a uniform on, then nobody really has to care if they get killed or not. They’re Our Brave Boys, fighting for our way of life, or the right to fill every Tesco car park with second-hand Range-Rovers, which is pretty much the same thing.

We do not give a fuck what happens in these countries. We do not care if every woman there gets raped or stoned to death. If you think that’s outrageous then direct your outrage to the fact that the government we installed in Afghanistan demands that wives are obliged to fulfill their husband’s sexual desires. That’s the law. If they don’t – and let’s face it, the Kabul Anne Summers shop probably isn’t much to inspire anyone – they can be starved to death. Us. We did that. It was against the law before our favourite Afghan changed the law there. Do we care if Arab women get stoned to death? We certainly didn’t care when a Saudi princes was beheaded in a carpark for playing away. We made a documentary about it (Death Of a Princess) and then decided not to show it, in case it upset ‘our way of life.’ Not the way of life that doesn’t generally behead women for shagging someone they perhaps ought not to have done, but the way of life that likes Saudi oil.

So let’s do what we always do. Let’s have a war. It doesn’t matter what side we pick, or who or what we’re fighting for, or how many times we change sides. That never happens. You won’t see any mention of it in the media. Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania and it’s Rude To Mention It anyway.

Vote for Rupert Murdoch, which in the UK should suit most people because you don’t even have to bother voting. Just remember when you don’t then you do. You vote for how things turn out. All of it. You wild non-voting rebel you.

And please, don’t go to the Remembrance service. Dying to support a pile of lies is a big enough insult to deal with, without people wrapping themselves in your shroud.

 

 

 

Share Button

That place

I used to drive around a lot, just for fun. There wasn’t much else to do where I grew up; everywhere was somewhere else. As I got older I kept on driving for fun, or if not fun then more often to be somewhere I wasn’t.

I bought a house in the Cotswolds one winter, a place I’d driven through when I was eighteen and not that far from where I was born, but we left there when I was two. The real  town I bought the old posting barn, four hundred years old, where footsteps often carried on from the old pub next door straight through where the wall was, six feet thick, and walked through the barn, and still the house I was happy walking around at three in the morning, can’t sleep, leaving the lights off to see the sleeping town was in Not Your Heart Away, the place where Ben and Claire, Peter and Liz stopped after the car crash they’d just escaped having.

But none of that ever happened. Things like it did, but that didn’t, because they were imaginary people. Almost. Just like that place.

That Place

That place we saw once

Driving that bright January day;

I can’t remember the name of the town

Just bigger than a village

I don’t often drive that way now.

But somewhere on a hill,

Stark trees against the sharp blue sky

Up on the ridge, a red phone box

Against the snowy hedge,

The morning almost silent

Now the car’s calmed down.

Our eyes nearly back to normal

Once the motorway’s long behind us.

Cold with the window open.

Definitely not a day you want

To come out without a coat.

That feeling in your throat this time of year

Making you wonder if it’s the weather

Or whether you’re getting a cold

And how long it’s been since you were here before.

The shop’s become someone’s house now

And other new houses built on fields

To let you know you’re getting older,

But still alive. Still alive

As a cat walks across the frosty road

This crisp morning and you’d swear

You caught the Boxing Day fox-hunting

Smell of cigars as you turned the corner

That wasn’t quite where you remembered it was.

Wrong turn; And you drive the length

Of this Cotswold street.

A man on his phone, smiling, carrying the newspaper

Back towards his home or someone else’s.

Safe and warm for now.

If you’d lived here it would have been different.

All of it. And you know that’s true.

How different it would all have been

If I’d never known you.

Share Button

Psychosis

For a day job I work for a mental health hospital. Today I read one of the descriptions of the services the hospital offers and wondered about the way the fear and stigma of mental illness has affected treatment, to the extent that it’s not the done thing to even talk about it. We can and do happily discuss mental health but it’s not really on to talk about mental illness. It’s frightening. It’s a total loss of control.

Out on the primal veldt if you break your leg the lions might get you sooner, but at least you can make a plan. Light a fire, sharpen a stick, do something to put it off. And maybe, maybe you’ll get through. But when your mind isn’t very well you’re the most vulnerable you can possibly be and still be alive. Your plan is going to be about as good as the lions’s and they’ve got much bigger teeth than you.

Watch a cat with another cat that just came back from the vet and acts woozy from the anaesthetic. That would be my fear of what would happen, that frightened people would lash out, as frightened people do. Unless you’re lucky. Unless you can get help.

The service description got me thinking of how sanitised the language of therapy has become. Maybe it’s a good thing. I honestly don’t know. In one way it helps by reminding people, maybe unintentionally, the thinness of the tightrope we all walk. I see people who’ve missed their footing every day. It’s a terrifyingly long way down.

 

Psychosis

Treatment for psychotic symptoms, including hearing voices and seeing things others do not, feeling paranoid or mistrustful, believing in an ability to read other people’s minds, feeling confused, irritable and depressed, not thinking clearly, feeling that bad things may happen to self or others, believing in one’s special powers or fame are classic symptoms of a psychotic episode.

 

The factsheet told me the symptoms are common

And extensively varied including hearing voices,

Or seeing things that other people don’t see and hear.

And it’s true. I hear voices that other people don’t.

Other people don’t share my memories

And I hear your voice still telling me it’ll be ok.

Feeling paranoid or mistrustful.

I used to think paranoid meant thinking

Everyone was out to get you

But in the end, one person’s quite enough

Especially when they don’t want to get you at all

But the opposite. They want to un-get you.

For good. And mistrust.

Where would I be without a healthy dose of that?

Signed up to share my bank account with a Nigerian prince

Who suddenly needs to get the money belonging to his uncle

Who sadly died in a plane crash out of the country.

If I’d only share my details half of it can be mine.

And I can tick another box now. I could read his mind

This prince with a distinctly un-royal address.

But maybe things are different there.

Where nobody is confused or irritable or depressed

Where everyone thinks clearly all the time,

Where the words psychosis and mental health

Or service user are hardly ever used,

Unlike American Express or bank account details.

It’s my attitude, isn’t it?

It’s all in my head, as if I could think anywhere else

And shift this feeling that bad things might happen to me

And they will without any question at all

Because nobody gets out of this alive.

Do I believe in my special powers? It depends.

Right now only my special power to survive

Unlike the tens of billions who went before me

Dying and being born, a flash and dust

Under an eternal flame

So yes. Hands up. Me sir! Me sir! Sir! Sir!

That’s my special fame.

 

 

 

This is not the thing I wanted to write about mental health treatment. It just came out that way. As some people seem to have problems, oops, sorry, I meant issues reading this and thinking ‘Is he?’ You know, is he like that?’ the answer is no. Not diagnosed, anyway.

Share Button

Trying to understand

German children, 1945.
German children, 1945.

Nothing you’re going to read here is new. No ground-shattering insights. No finally-revealed truths. I wish there were. There aren’t any. Almost everyone knows you shouldn’t go around killing other people and the people who don’t know that you can’t talk to anyway, because there isn’t any point.

I’ve spent the morning trying to understand people. I started reading about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, someone you might never have heard of in exactly the same way I hadn’t until this morning. He was a German Lutheran who entered the church. Two days after the Nazi Party really kicked off in a big way he started making speeches about how crap an idea Nazism was. When he tried this on the radio the broadcast went silent, not entirely surprisingly.

He went to America, to London, to Norway, he went to all sorts of places until inevitably the Gestapo killed him, just a few weeks before the end of the war. He seems to have worked for Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr, the German intelligence organisation, which was how he was able to travel so easily and why he stayed alive so long. The Abwehr seemed to have a rivalry with the Gestapo, the other intelligence operation, which was the one that eventually knocked on Bonhoeffer’s door very early one morning.

I don’t know anything about this stuff. All I knew was Bonhoeffer’s saying that people who stay silent, people who know and refuse to do anything are just as guilty as the people who do the bad things. It’s something I’ve always believed, coming from a family that lied and stayed silent about almost everything, but especially the physical and emotional abuse carried out within it. If you know and keep your mouth shut you aren’t doing nothing, you’re doing a great deal. You’re protecting the people doing it, actively. The same way that not voting protects the people you pretend you didn’t vote for when in fact you did, by not voting against them.

Spending the morning trying to find out more about all of this was not the most fun I’ve ever had. It lead straight to the ludicrous David Irving, whose ‘scientific’ analysis claiming to have found no trace of cyanide in gas chambers rested on the evidence of someone who wasn’t a scientist in the first place. There is a pile of testimony, not just from camp survivors but from guards as well, with plenty saying “it wasn’t me guv,” or they didn’t have a choice or the eternal favourite ah-yes-but-others-were-worse-than-me but none that I read this morning saying no, they weren’t gas chambers, they were just places we de-loused clothes in, or tried to fix leaky car exhaust pipes, like Kwik-Fit, that’s all it was, honest. I spent a lot of time reading through the Nizkor Project files. None of them said anything like that. The testimony read the same way other material from that time does, the same phrasing, the same ways of speaking. I’ve read a lot of it. I’ve talked to people who were there.

There was a pile of lies though. “They all knew about it” was one of them. There was no internet. When the Red Army Faction tried to radicalise Hamburg dockers in the early 1960s, telling people their phones were being tapped, they missed the middle-class point that back then, nearly twenty years later, most people still didn’t have phones. People didn’t drive to work en masse in the 1940s and look out of the window at the barbed wire fences when they stopped to do their lippy at the lights. There was something of a war on. And most people didn’t have cars.

This isn’t really about the war, although it haunted my parents’s generation and many of my teachers at school, from the primary school English teacher who insisted that the American forces ‘weren’t on our side,’ to the ex-Paratrooper PE instructor everyone respected, but for his fairness rather than his stabby/shooty ability with a Sykes-Fairbairn knife and a Sten gun. It’s about the other mass killing going on, but even that’s a nonsense.

There are plenty of mass killings going on, all over the world. We’re told about the ones that are good for us, the ones the news organisations and the government want us to know about. We’re not told in any detail  about the conflicting theories about the death of hundreds of people in an airplane over Ukraine; we’re told the Russians did it, one way or another. We’re not told where the mysterious tunnels and rocket launcher sites the IDF keeps not destroying in Gaza actually are or how many of them there are or how come the primitive rocket launchers keep manufacturing themselves in Gaza when there isn’t any electricity any more, no port, no airport and no way in or out. We’re not told why it’s ok to invade other countries like Iraq and totally destroy infrastructure there, then rebuild it and give the reconstruction contracts to the Vice-President’s company without competitive tender. We’re told what we need to know. And it leaves me with questions.

If the Nazis set-out to kill every Jew in the Riech, why did they leave any? Why did they start winding the programme down in 1943? Why did they do it in the first place? Why wouldn’t Churchill and the British government have any serious talk with Bonhoeffer? Or with Hess, if it was in fact Rudolf Hess who turned up in Scotland? What did Hitler and his best political mates have against Jews? Why don’t we all know about the German resistance, not just about Bonhoeffer but the doomed White Rose group or at the other end of the social scale the Eidelweiss Pirates, the working class Hamburg kids who used to hunt Hitler Youth recruits and beat them up?  Why is it ok to occupy somewhere illegally in the face of more UN resolutions than were ever passed against any other country and the US, the fearless defender of Gahd, mom and democracy, whose troops marched off to Iraq fatuously declaring they were ‘honour bound defending freedom’ has absolutely nothing to say about it?

Unidentified US pilot at Leiston, between June 1943-45. The puppy sits on a drop-tank.
Unidentified US pilot at Leiston, between June 1943-45. The puppy sits on a drop-tank.

Why? Why can’t we be told and why to any of it anyway? Is it just what we do, us humans, the worst, most adaptive destructive monkeys?

I think it is. A few years ago I met a man who was then in his eighties, who’d flown Mustang fighters for the USAAF from Leiston in Suffolk, an airfield a few miles from my house. He was from Ohio and spoke with that slow, gentle Mid-West tone that belied the fact that he’d been trained specifically to kill people, for no other purpose. He stayed in my house for ten days for two summers. There was a lot of swing music. A lot of beer and memory.

He told me a lot of things about the closing days of the war, how he’d been sent to Germany along with the rest of his squadron just a few weeks after the end of the war, how he’d had one date with a German girl and decided he’d live longer if he didn’t after someone opened up on him with a sub-machine gun just after he kissed her goodnight. He never found who it was after he spent an hour hiding in a dark wood until he was pretty sure the ex had gone. He told me about sleeping with a loaded .45 under his pillow after leftover German guerillas calling themselves Werewolves had promised to sneak into the allied bases and kill the invaders in their beds. He told me about a time when his flight had attacked four German aircraft and destroyed all of them and how he felt guilty admiring the incredible beauty of the blue-green flash of two of the aircraft as they exploded. How at least the two young men inside died instantly, unlike the other two who had a minute or more to fall to earth with the pieces of their aircraft falling around them.

He told me about the camp he’d seen.

He told me about piles of bodies. It doesn’t make a penny’s-worth of difference whether there were a hundred or a thousand or ten million, or whether they died from gas or bullets or typhoid or starvation. None of them needed to. None of them should have. He told me about how his squadron saw this and how they decided to go into the nearest town. They rounded up every German they could find at gunpoint and marched them through the camp, young and old, so nobody could say afterwards that they didn’t know. The mayor of the little town killed himself soon after that. When the last German had been lead through the camp the young Americans had another conversation. What say they stop by the armoury and just go back into town and kill every last one of those bastards? This was a serious discussion item. A very senior officer had to stop it because a lot of the junior officers were onboard with the idea. It was a popular theme.

So I can understand people being so sickened that they think the only thing to do is to do the same thing. I can’t understand why people need to lie about what they were doing, or what they intend to do. People like David Irving, American Presidents, the IDF PR department I can’t understand at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Share Button

Walcot Nation

I lived in Bath a long time ago. In those days a lot of the buildings were black with 200 years of soot from coal fires but it was a bustling, busy place. It still is, but where once Walcot Street was full of combat jackets and patchouli oil, today it’s Range-Rover parking and shops selling bathroom taps for half a term’s student grant. There was a fabulous market there on Saturdays if you ever needed a cheap car radio, definitely not stolen, oh dear me no. You tested it by clipping a car battery to the cut power lead once the guy selling it had peeled back the insulation, and taping another lead to any speaker lying around the stall. Bath has changed. This poem is a little of how it was.

haile selassie house

A WESTERN SUN

I hear that song, still feel the heat of a western sun

Those years ago but now –  and it’s always now, in my head,

Always the time I first heard it aged seventeen

And my, those ten years just flew by, didn’t they?

That’s just when it was.

I can see the blurred flag flapping in slow motion

Snapping in the damp wind of my false memories

Of long haired men marching to the war we despised

But that was someone else’s war ten years before,

Something that was all in our minds

As we wandered up Walcot Street to the Hat & Feathers,

Leather jackets and silk scarves, the day of the festival

A sweat salt tang stayed on our lips

Our battle salve patchouli hazed our dreams

That blurred afternoon and back then we dared to dream

Not about BMWs and ISAs or chartered accountancy

Or a thrilling carer in actuarial statistics and dear God

If I’d only known that the loose connections, the loops

Of if-this-then-that in my head, the spurting synapses undammed

By dope and cursed by my teachers at a country school

Could have bought me half the grey stone town I grew up in

By now. Probably. But stop. But stop.

Never go down this road

Where half the streetlights aren’t working,

Lit only by the dipped beam of my memory

Coming from a car I haven’t had for twenty years

A faulty bulb flickering whenever I put the wipers on.

You know that if you take this track you’ll only get a hundred yards or so

Until a cold girl in a warm car, silhouetted against the trees

Lit like the backdrop of a play, so cold outside;

The girl in the sheepskin coat will say

‘What if there’s nothing there, the other side of the gate?’

The second it appears in the headlights.

Even then you felt her voice would hunt your dreams,

Sniffing you out while you sleep, wherever you hide at night.

But that flag, the flapping ripple of cloth,

And the hair blown across her forehead and somewhere

The taste of tears as well as the kiss still on her lips;

The army coats and the smell of goats when her bag got rained on;

The time she did, she really did tie red ribbons in her hair

And small golden bells. They looked golden anyway,

Borrowed from the mirror on her dresser,

Bought from a headshop one Saturday afternoon in Bath.

Can you believe those words, now?

This long since Princess Margaret and her happy dusted chums

Played with a restaurant and a farm to feed it, up on the Swindon road,

The way Peter Starstedt said it then, just for a laugh, ah ha ha.

Parsenn Sally. Later, in the eighties a waitress paused

When a customer pushed his napkin to the floor,

Measuring the length of her skirt as she stopped

Looked to the audience, fifty or so of us willing

To show the colour of our money,

Waiting to see the colour of her underwear,

A fiver on white, ten on black,

Wild bets on something awful like cerise

As she put a finger mocking to her lips, shook her head,

Bent her knees a little, just to tease, then flexed her leg,

Kicked the napkin under the nearest table

To a round of applause.

“Another bottle of fitou over here, if you would”

The appreciative click of credit cards on glass tables.

“And have one for you.”

Bath where Regency houses lured London workers with their siren song

Bath where water streamed down Royal Crescent walls,

The lead flashing long gone, during the war probably,

When patriotic householders bore the loss not just of sons

But irreplaceably the 1820s cast iron trellices, rococco awnings,

Gates and railings cropped and sawn and smelted to beat the Hun,

Our loss; as if cast iron Spitfires ever flew

Or steel swallows ever perched in Larkhall Mansions.

Scars from bomb splinters still pock the stonework near M&S,

The slashed birthmark of our time

Still there if you know where to look

Past the ghosts of open markets, joss-sticks and motorcycles

Cafes full of lean dogs and coke stoves,

Not a baby buggy in sight.  All of this emblazoned on our tattered flag.

All of this our banner as we marched

Under the stained pennants of our duvets towards now.

Come the revolution in Walcot Street.

Come the glorious day.

We didn’t see the bathroom showrooms coming.

We thought it would turn out ok.

 

 

Share Button
Follow on Feedly