Pedalling on

I’ve cycled all my life. I grew up in the countryside and if you wanted to go anywhere you were expected to make your own way, back then. You walked, you got a bus or you cycled. Only rarely your parents would get a car out and take you, so for example, if you wanted to go to Tellisford to pretend to be fishing, five or six of you aged eleven or twelve would tie fishing rods to your bikes and cycle along the main A361. That was, admittedly, the rubbish bit, sharing the road with huge trucks full or processed meat and pork pies from Bowyers.

When I was fourteen I cycled 40 miles over the Mendips to go and stay with my uncle one Easter. I practised the route for a few weekends, seeing the dawn come up for the first time in my life near Farleigh Castle, on the lanes and unbeleivable main roads Ben drove in Not Your Heart Away. A few miles further on, about six in that summer morning, I turned a corner just before Kilmsersdon hill and found a warren of rabbits hopping about the road. None of them had heard me; there was no other traffic around.

I’d had rubbish bikes before that, single speed steel framed things that were like that not because it was a hipster statement but because the3-speed Sturmey Archer hub gear had seized solid years before. And steel-framed because all frames were, hand-brazed in Nottingham just the way they were in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Craftsmanship for some people. Mind-numbing drudgery for more.

Mine was lime-green metal flake, back when you ordered the colour you wanted and waited weeks while they made it in Nottingham.
Mine was lime-green metal flake, back when you ordered the colour you wanted and waited weeks while they made it in Nottingham.

But this trip, that trip was on a beautiful lime-green Carlton Continental, the kind of bike we’d now call a light tourer or an Audax, but then we just called it a racing bike, because it had drop handlebars wrapped with white cork tape and 14 gears. Yes! Fourteen!! Could there actually BE that many??? That was my first real bike, £40 I paid for out of my paper round. That was a serious amount of money back then.

Yesterday two more people were killed when they were crushed under a bigger vehicle that didn’t see them. Instantly, lots of people are going to say that’s why children shouldn’t be allowed out on bikes and why every cyclist should be made to wear a helmet.

Horrible though it must be to be hit by a lorry the figures say otherwise. The statistical illiteracy that seems to be fashionable doesn’t help.  A BBC report clamoured alarm when bicycle accidents increased by 3%. But bicycle journeys had increased by 4%; bicycling per mile had actually got safer.

In 2000 , 2.3 million new bicycles were sold in the UK. In 2011 that had gone up to over 3.5 million. Over four out of ten adults in the UK have access to a bicycle, even if they don’t own their own. Three quarters of a million people cycle to work regularly. Three million people cycle at least three times a week. (All figures from CTC).

In my cycling life I’ve been hit by a car mirror and separately a Lambretta. In rural Suffolk  a car driver deliberately try to ride me into the ditch after I politely thanked him for driving towards me at 50 mph and missing me by less than six inches. He bravely stopped, turned around and showed his small son some definitive good parenting role-model work by driving at me. I got into the middle of the lane. I couldn’t do anything about it if he actually chose to drive into me; I could make sure he couldn’t pretend it was an accident. At the first junction he pulled over and demanded I come and talk to him. He got the fingerand I rode off. I didn’t have to use my D-Lock.

The D-Lock. So many practical applications on a bicycle.
The D-Lock. So many practical applications on a bicycle.

In London in the 1980s anyone riding expected about one close call a week on a bike. We found the flat of a hand banged on a car boot was the best retaliation. Some people recommended a Jiffy lemon filled with battery acid but I was always worried it would leak in my pocket. The flat of the hand on the boot worked for me. Inside it sounded as if their car had exploded. When they stopped and got out screaming there was nothing for them to see.

Whatever petty vandalism you do on a bicycle the ending is the same: in a collision with another vehicle  on a bicycle you are going to come off worst. If you go up the inside of a bus or lorry at the lights you’d better make sure they see you in case they turn left. If it was a bus with a door at the front I made sure I got eye contact with the driver, so he knew I was there. With a truck you haven’t got a hope.

I used to hitch-hike when I was a student. If you’ve ever been in a truck cab you’ll know there’s a patch at the bottom of the passenger door you can’t get the mirrors to show. If you’re on a bike and you’re in that blind spot then you are in mortal danger. That isn’t being dramatic. If those wheels roll over you that’s it.

How would you know the driver can’t see you? Well, can you see the driver? It’s as good a test as any. Even if you can, you still don’t know if he can see you.

So dress up like a Christmas tree. Put extra lights on your bike. Wear a hi-viz vest. Wear a helmet if you really think a bit of plastic is going to stop 30-tonnes of lorry going over you from doing anything lasting. But whatever you do, don’t go up the inside of anything at the lights. They can’t see you. And odds are you won’t be there for long for anyone to see.

 

 

 

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Live groupies

I’ve just finished the first live music broadcast on the Lifeboat Party today when I had Jack Pescod and Hannah Vogt in to play. She played the violin, so that was no problem apart from pronouncing her name properly. Vocked, apparently. German. Don’t mention the war. I did, but I think I got away with it.

He said he was bringing a piano in. How we roared! Until he turned up with an electric piano in a case, with a stand and a collection of tangled leads but not one that would feed directly into the mixing desk, so we had to mic it up which picked up the noise of his hands on the keyboard and blah. But the music was sublime. I thought so anyway. Hope the listeners did.

The duo – is that the right word? It doesn’t sound right, although they do – are performing at Butley Priory, home to Frances Shelley who was on the show recently. I’m doing some lyrics for her. Did I mention that? Didn’t I? Oh sorry. I’m doing some lyrics for her, for her third CD. The one of hers I played today was from her second album, the beautiful All I Want from the album Wilderness Rhapsodies.

I love the little piano line. It reminds me of Listen With Mother, not exactly but to me there’s an element of some half-forgotten children’s story, from the times when little boys wore shorts and knee length socks at this time of year.

The show finished at one pm. At five past we had a phone call at the studio. Is the Carl Bennett show still on? Have I missed it?

Don’t know who it was. But whoever, you can hear still hear it on the Listen Again thing. I hope you like it, whoever you are.

 

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Mobile

pilgrim

A little bleary this morning after a nearly five hour phone call with my oldest friend of all. We met when I was 16. We went to school together. We lost touch for about five years, a long time back, just moving around, then we got back in contact. There is a good thing about an unlimited talk contract on a mobile. There is something much better about having a friend you can tell everything, who can hold you as well as scold you. Who is always, always there.

This has been a difficult year on so many different levels. But I have been blessed this year, discovering things about myself. Some were things I didn’t want to learn. And one of the most important things I had not learned is that friends are there and when you ask them to, most people will help if they can.

I learned you have to be strong enough to ask for help too. Which is a sad and interesting dynamic in itself, because often when you really need help you aren’t strong enough to ask for it or to accept it when it’s there.  So as Paul Simon put it, we talked about the old times and we drank ourselves some beers. Or now we’re who we are and the age we are, we drank a bottle of wine together, 220 miles apart. We weren’t crazy though, then or now. Just happy to be talking to each other in a place where time didn’t happen, where even if it did, this huge thing, that wasn’t going to change or go away, ever.

My friend’s job is sensitive. The things she deals with every day are horrible and they happen to lots of people, far more than people like to admit. She’s not a spy or a secret agent or anything like that but in her job using Facebook would be instant career suicide. So she won’t see this. Her children will. And they know how it is anyway.

Thank-you, my most brilliant friend, in a year which has sparkled with brilliant friends, not just you, but the Brilliant Three as well who this dark summer have kept me mostly upright, who have picked me up, who have been on their own different penances and pilgrimages, who sometimes I was able to help a bit, too. Thank-you, my friends. Thank-you so much.

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Put out the light

It’s 27th October. As Bruce Springsteen used to sing, it’s Saturday night, you’re all alone and feeling blue. Well hopefully you’re not, but I am.

The clocks go back tonight. It’s now officially  UT, GMT, Universal Time, Greenwich Mean Time. Not British Summer Time, as it’s been since 31st March. It’s officially Not Summer any more.

Summer, flowing past.
Summer, flowing past.

I don’t like this part of the year, the days getting shorter. Everything seems worse in the dark. I keep telling myself all I have to do is get through to the 21st December, not even two months and then the evenings will get lighter again, really quickly and long, long before the 31st March and official Summer time again everything will be ok. Well, the evenings will be lighter anyway. It helps.

I even don’t like July and August, for the same reason. It’s past the peak, past the longest day and however deliriously summery and drowsy and hot and torpid the evenings, you know that slowly but surely the year like the wasp-eaten fruit is past its best and it’s all downhill to Beltane.

I know. It’s being so cheerful what keeps me going. I got one of those SAD lamps, for Seasonally Acquired Disasters or whatever they’re called, and that helps a bit. Nothing helps so much as getting outside, which means getting up early and getting out for a walk before things start for the day. I haven’t got a dog. I can understand getting one, even if only to make you get up and out and smell the clouds before the day really starts. It’s been a long journey, this summer.

 

Put out the light, and then put out the light: 

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, 
I can again thy former light restore, 
Should I repent me:–but once put out thy light, 
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature, 
I know not where is that Promethean heat 
That can thy light relume.

But it will be relumed, if that’s actually a thing. The days will get longer again. Just eight weeks of this to get through. I can do it. We all can.

And the clocks will go back again. Next year it’s 20th March. There’s even a special government website about it, to tell you, so you don’t have to listen to The Archers, the normal way of learning what’s going on. All I need to do is get through this next bit. Like all of life. It’ll be ok.

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Put your lights on

In a story absolutely nothing to do with Carlos Santana’s song, which as a sign of aging I still think is quite new even though it came out in 1999, according to the BBC the Energy Secretary Ed Davey has defended the building of a new nuclear power station at Hinckley Point as “a very good deal for Britain.”  In twenty years of providing research-based consultancy I’ve come to detest facts being used to spin a story that they contradict, not least because when the person doing it is found out the first thing he does is blame the people who provided them. I’ve seen whole company boards of directors literally screaming across a table at each other when that happens. It doesn’t generally go in the book of best management practice. But then, incidents like that are supposed to magically unhappen in most management books I’ve ever read.

I don’t know whether nuclear power is better or worse than windmills or tidal barrages or lots of people on stationary bicycles converted into dynamos. But the number of flat contradictions in the story makes me think someone isn’t so much being what the last Tory government chose to call being economical with the actuality, as flat lying.

“A good deal for Britain” now means giving an eye-watering amount of money to EDF, the French company which will be building and operating the power station, along with a Chinese company. In both France and China these companies are effectively nationalised, so now a good deal for Britain directly means that UK tax payers’ money is given directly to foreign governments and this is officially Good. This isn’t me being a bit political, as Ben Elton used to say. There isn’t another way of looking at this. The money couldn’t, for example, be given to the British government’s power companies because they were sold off cheap (just like the Royal Mail, whose shares have jumped 50% in the first week since the launch).

The government estimates that energy bills will be £77 lower by 2030, but Mr Davey could not guarantee this because of the “uncertainties”.

In other words, Mr Davey, who as a Cabinet Minister is one of the most senior members of ‘the government’ has said that what was said isn’t necessarily true.

Greenpeace pointed out helpfully that the official story is that power prices are going to be locked for 35 years. But as David Cameron, the Prime Minister said last week, he couldn’t stop power prices rising this winter. There is no magical thing that makes this winter (the one where prices cannot be controlled) different from the one half a lifetime away where apparently they can.

Even normally shy and retiring Ed Milliband had to comment on the fact that his Right Honourable Friend said he couldn’t do anything at all about consumer prices now, but could definitely fix the price the government was going to pay for power in 35 years.

Mr Davey plans to submit the application for state aid clearance to the EC.

Let’s look at that for a second. You might think the dead hand of the European Union shouldn’t get involved with the workings of a sovereign government. You might also wonder why the UK government is in the business of giving state aid to foreign companies, especially when they are owned by foreign governments. Clearly it’s not enough that we exported the production of the stuff that fills pound shops to China; now we have to give state aid to their government as well.

Angela Knight, chief executive of trade body Energy UK, said 

“We’ve got 10 years in which to insulate our homes better. We’ve got 10 years to take the steps that some other countries have taken – especially those in colder countries – to make sure that we can keep warm but use less.” 

Some other countries have a private rented housing market, where energy inefficient homes are harder to find occupants for. Some other countries actually build houses, modern, energy efficient, insulated houses, rather than allowing ‘the market’ to dictate that fewer new homes were built last year than in any year in the previous ninety. That’s right. in 1924 more homes were built than in 2012. The market doesn’t want new homes. If there were new homes then the rubbishy inefficient heat-leaking old ones we have wouldn’t sell for as much. Who on earth wants that?

Still, what do I know? Someone who probably knows a little bit more about stuff than me is Dr Paul Dorfman, from the Energy Institute at University College London, who said “what it equates to actually is a subsidy and the coalition said they would never subsidise nuclear”.

He added: “It is essentially a subsidy of between what we calculate to be £800m to £1bn a year that the UK taxpayer and energy consumer will be putting into the deep pockets of Chinese and French corporations, which are essentially their governments.”

Where do you even start with this?

So just to sum up, officially we don’t have any money and we can’t interfere in the market because not only is the market always right (except if it looks like the Royal Mail was deliberately and fraudulently undervalued, robbing the taxpayer, in which case it’s just a fluke and hardly worth mentioning) but interfering with the market means your Mum fancied Stalin. At exactly the same time we have £800 million a year to give to the French and Chinese governments in state aid so transparent that we have to ask the EC really nicely if it’s ok that we give it to them. Oh and the teeny little lie about never subsidising nuclear power, obviously.

Appropriately enough, way back in the 1980s there was a TV series called Edge of Darkness (not to be confused with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a searing insight into the 1970s power cuts and the Three Day Week, or Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness On The Edge of Town, a song protesting intermittent rural New Jersey power supplies), the hero’s daughter got herself shot protesting about nuclear energy, setting her father off on a quest to find out who was lying about what. Along the way he met a CIA man who saw the light, spitting out ‘Nuclear energy – they threw truth out the window the day they invented that stuff.’

Something to do with copyright and You Tube which I don’t pretend to understand is stopping me being able to bring you Put Your Lights On with sound.  So I’ll just type the words and you can hum them.

There’s a monster living under my bed
Whispering in my ear
There’s an angel with a hand on my head
She says I got nothing to fear

We all shine like stars, then we fade away.

I used to believe that grown-ups mostly told the truth and tried to help. Then I grew up too.

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Full disclosure

It was dark. We’d finished eating. I got up to open a bottle of wine. She looked down and frowned and pursed her lips as she sat at the kitchen table. I’d got used to that look. It was usually when I said I loved her.

“It won’t work. You just say everything, to anyone. I don’t want anyone knowing about me. I might as well get a sign made as tell you anything. It’s what you’re like.”

She looked up at me then and kept my eyes until I sat down. What she said was true. Sort of.

I do say things. A bit. Quite a lot, in fact. My truest, deepest friends will tell you. The kind ones call it ‘sharing.’ There’s a reason for it.

In my life some people have benefitted hugely from silence. My father, for one. We were one of the last houses on the new estate in the fields to have a telephone. My father worked away from home a lot. In fact he was only at the house three or maybe four times a week at the most. Even some Christmasses he’d have to work and as children we never knew when he would arrive. Then everything had to change as the whole house was geared to welcome his triumphant homecoming.

Name and rank

His parents were dead, so conveniently dead that although he talked about his father who was in a submarine accident off Blyth after WW1 (but not one that can be identified clearly, looking at any website I’ve ever found) and the mother whose foot his ex-RAF guard dog used to hold gently in its mouth none of them turned up at his wedding to my mother. In fact, nobody had ever seen a single relation of my father’s, ever. Alarm bells ringing just a teeny bit yet? They should be.

So, it’s the 1960s, we have a new house, my father has a new car every two years and he isn’t there a lot of the time. When he is the whole house is disrupted. As children when we’re asked at school what our parents do my father goes ballistic and roars around the house screaming that he’s going to complain to the school officially. Somehow he never does, officially or otherwise.

action man
The invisible man.

The time he really blew up at me was over an Action Man. Action Man, like my father who had been in the RAF during what was then called The War (we just don’t have proper wars any more) had a pay-book. With his name and serial number in it. I didn’t know anything about serial numbers, so when I had to (obviously) fill-in the details I asked my father what his serial number was. Because he’d spent six years giving this every time anybody asked for it my father recited it immediately. Then there was a silence.

“Why do you want it?”

I said it was to put it in my Action Man’s pay book. The rest of the day was shit.

I didn’t know why for years. Nearly fifteen years in fact, until I worked out that his serial number was the one thing he couldn’t fake. And as a career liar, my father faked a lot. Like many abusers, he got his victims to collude with the abuse, making excuses for him, refusing to check his lies, pretending things he said or did were a misunderstanding.

Things came to a head when my mother tried to divorce him and found out that you can’t divorce someone you aren’t actually legally married to. For example, if they were already married when they married you. And running a parallel family, although strictly speaking that part isn’t enshrined in law. John Richard Bennett, presumably the only son of Hannah Ramsey and John Bennett, who were married in the parish church of St Mary Cray, near Orpington, wasn’t born in Australia. His parents were never immigrants to the UK. He did not arrive in the UK aged two. He was not a dashing pilot. He was a liar, a bigamist and an abuser who during the war learned to work a lathe on an airfield somewhere. His fondness for the Wellington bomber he made from an Airfix kit might narrow down which airfield he was on if anyone could be bothered to find out. I can’t.

I’ve probably just done it again. John Richard Bennett, bigamist and abuser, sometime resident of Snitterfield, Warkwickshire, Gillingham, Dorset  Southwick and Trowbridge, Wiltshire, take a bow. You’re in the limelight, the place you always thought should be yours, but I think maybe for different reasons. I’ve stopped protecting abusers.

The beautiful woman in my kitchen the other night isn’t sitting at my table now. But if she ever reads this, that’s the reason why I say things. That’s why I’ve spent 20 years finding things out and telling people about them, for a living. That’s why I don’t like secrets. If people don’t want people knowing about the things they do there’s usually a good reason for it and I’ve never heard a nice one. Silence isn’t golden. It covers up abuse so everyone can pretend it isn’t happening. Silence doesn’t protect the victims, it just hides the people who look for victims. I’ve seen that happen enough.

 

 

 

 

 

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Special Offer on Not Your Heart Away

Not_Your_Heart_Away_Cover_for_Kindle

 

A while back JK Rowling brought a new book out. It launched through a major publisher, with the normal promotion given to any book but with one crucial difference. It didn’t have her name on the cover. Instead, someone decided that The Cuckoo’s Calling was going to have Robert Galbraith’s name as the author.

It sold 1,500 copies.

It was written by the same author who normally sells books by the warehouse full, the one whose Harry Potter books have put over £23o million into clearing her overdraft. JK Rowling doesn’t need my help to sell her books. But the story illustrates a point – it wasn’t the author stopping the sales; it was the way people perceived the book.

Known author – good. Unknown author – is it worth it?

So I thought I’d make buying Not Your Heart Away worth your while, baby. From today, Not Your Heart Away for Kindle is available at $0.99, or 77p in real money. Don’t say I never do anything for you.

If you want a real paper copy then obviously it’s a little more expensive. If you haven’t got a Kindle you can download the Kindle reader free and install it on absolutely anything with a screen, except perhaps an Etch-a-sketch. It might not be quite the same on that.

So at last, it’s cheap enough to give it a go. What have you got to lose, apart from 77p?

As Ben the narrator says, maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true, so long as you believe it is. Maybe that’s how it works.

 

 

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The past is another country

What farms are those?
What farms are those?

Not Your Heart Away steals its title from Housman’s poem, A Shropshire Lad. The poem had two main themes, the idolization and mythology of the English countryside and sound advice to a young man, to give not his heart away so young, advice which Ben, the late teenage narrator ignores as any young man should.

The book is set in 1980 or thereabouts. A distant time now; a period teetering on the brink of monumental change at a personal and national level to all of which Ben was almost totally oblivious.

Along with his girlfriend Theresa, school-friends Liz and Peter and more distant, contemporarily more desirable (read ‘richer’ in proto-Thatcherite Britain) friends Claire and Poppy, Ben is stuck between adulthood and childhood, school and university, home and something much stranger, much more desirable. The small town girlfriend is going nowhere, Peter’s going to work, Liz is going to university, Poppy to Drama School if she can convince anyone to let her in and Claire, the girl he doesn’t think he can get, is about to fall off a cliff as her secure, affluent world implodes in the wake of her parents’ wife-swapping disaster and the first of a long line of bankruptcies that underscored the Thatcher revolution.

Nothing out of the ordinary really happens. The group of friends drives to see a play and avoid a car crash on the way. They have a lust-charged picnic on the river then eat dinner in a restaurant, struggling not only with the menu but with the fact that the nice old man at the bar was a Nazi when he was their age. Ben can’t stop looking at Claire all through the theatre performance; the real reason he arranged the trip in the first place.

He learns about the summer job that will take her away from him during the drive back. After totally failing to recognise a nice middle-class girl’s way of offering herself on a plate Ben arranges a trip to London on an errand and accidentally-on-purpose gets off with Claire’s best friend. Moping about back in Wiltshire and trying to convince Liz that he’s going to be a famous writer Ben’s world explodes again when he discovers Claire not 5,000 miles away as he thought but sitting in the back room of a pub drunk, half-mad with rage, a U.S. deportation notice and the keys of a stolen Aston-Martin in her bag.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true, so long as you believe it is

It’s a tale of country pubs that no longer exist, some drinking, driving and drug-taking that nowadays might bring a smile of indulgence to the lips of the most hardened front-line police officer, of blue remembered hills and myths. At the same time the book is a requiem for lost love, lost songs and lost times. Ben finally gets the girl but really should have asked himself if that was going to be the best thing; when he loses her again all too easily in a world devoid of Google and Facebook and mobile phones the rest of his life becomes a morass of blame and regret as each successive partner fails the Claire-test.

It’s probably not their fault, not even a bit as Ben says, but they still just aren’t Claire. Ultimately, thanks to Liz, Ben’s oldest friend of all, he finds her again. But Claire is a continent away, her old house is now a hotel, Liz and Ben have some talking to do that can’t be put off much longer and Claire’s son bears a strange resemblance to someone Ben sees every morning when he shaves. The past is another country. They do things differently there. But Ben’s problem is that he never really left.

You can buy it here: Not Your Heart Away.

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The unforgiving minute

First thing a big long walk and it felt good. A great start to the day. Then a shower, clean clothes and then Aldeburgh, in a bit of a rush now  because I’m not 100% clear on what I’m doing with these papers I’m delivering and I have to be somewhere else at half ten. The Lifeboat Party radio show goes out at noon and if I’m not on air it doesn’t go out. It concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Focus. Remember to breathe.

Get to Snape Maltings and get a text from the person I’m interviewing in the Britten Rooms. I’m in the Britten Rooms, she’s still ten minutes away in her car. Time, time, time. It’s ok. We get a quiet room, which would have been quieter if someone wasn’t knocking a wall down next door, by the sound of it. Do the interview unscripted and absolutely no time to edit, recording this on my iPhone. Yes, I’ve got a proper digital audio recorder. The iPhone gives a lot better sound quality. And it’s armoured, in case I drop it. Blitz through, thank my guest, mwah mwah and get in the car. I parked round the back because my car’s so old. Mildly amused to see her car’s even older.

Get to the station and Ray the station manager tells me I have a listener in China, so obviously Bowie’s Little China Girl has to be the first track on the playlist. He tells me I have a new Spanish listener too, but Spanish Eyes just doesn’t do it for me. I remember this from a time ten years ago when I was holed up in a hotel bedroom in Hong Kong, marvelling at the Merchant Ivory ferries on the water over to Kowloon, wondering if I’d ever see someone again. (Answer. Yes. And no. Can’t win them all. Husband issues. You know how it goes).

First guest, well ok, only guest on this week’s show was Naomi Jaffa who runs the Poetry Trust in Halesworth. She was fun. Poetry as a living art form. “I have no street credibility at all.”  Well, she sounded fine to me. I got her to read “Bike With No Hands.” Interviews are something I’ve done for the past fifteen years and that one was done half an hour before the show, no script, no editing, just straightforward old-fashioned getting people to talk about what they love. And it felt good. I didn’t know Snape was hosting Europe’s largest contemporary poetry festival. Such a small place for such a big event, powered by dedication. You really can move mountains if you try. As Kate Bush said, just saying it can even make it happen. Well, most of the time, anyway. The Kate Bush thing hasn’t quite happened outside my closed eyelids, but there’s still time.

A couple of songs then the Suffolk Metrosexuals story. Apparently more and more Suffolk men are slapping on the fake tan and getting their eye-brows done. Maybe it’s me but I think it takes a little more than that to qualify as a metrosexual. Like living in a metropolitan area, for a start. I couldn’t keep a straight face to even read it. Who makes this stuff up?

The song remains the same

A bit of Buzzcocks playing Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With)? Of course. Who hasn’t? I think the Fine Young Cannibals version just edges past this earlier version, but that could just be me. I’m old enough to remember them both. I certainly remember the energy of the Buzzcocks’ first version, and the oddness of the way the FYC version always sounded in 1989 as if the original was done in the 1960s.

Suffolk radio broadband was a good local news story and I think we covered it without it getting too technical. The idea is that it works via satellite, but I’m not sure where the signal comes from to begin with. It has to come from somewhere, surely. It can’t just be internet-ness. If that’s even a thing. A quick bit of Johnny Cougar, as he used to be called before he stuck the extra bit on his name (for tax reasons?), then into the serious story. I know one person switched off at that point. But it needs airing. Domestic abuse happens and if Radio Castle is going to be a proper community radio station with an OFCOM VHF broadcast licence then it needs to serve the community. I wish everything was like Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion (I wish I was more like Garrison Keillor, come to that), but I think I handled the theme passably. I didn’t sensationalise and above all, I got the contact numbers out where people can find them. I think I’m going to do that in every show in future. Domestic abuse happens. The victims often end up thinking it only happens to them. But it doesn’t. It was an upsetting story. I thought my voice was going to go at the end of it. Maybe John Lee Hooker’s I Want To Hug You wasn’t the best choice to close the story with, but better than Eye Of The Tiger or something.

Had to calm it down with a bit of John Martyn and somehow the hour’s gone and we’re into the closing blah. At the start of every show I don’t really know how I’m going to fill the time. At the end I can’t see how sixty minutes have gone. I hope it’s the same for the listeners.

The unforgiving minute comes from Kipling’s poem “If.”

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Mine is the Earth? Hmm. Or maybe I just won’t bore the pants off the listeners. I’ll settle for that.

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Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true…

 

Lions 

A long time ago I took a cat to the vet. He never liked going there even though the vet was kind, competent and did everything he could that I could see to calm down the queue of indignant dogs and cats whose dinner was late and who’d just been bundled into a plastic crate for strangers to stare at. The cat was called Reg; his brother had been called Ron and they were London cats. Anyone of a certain age can guess which one was the clever one with an attitude.

Good manners don't cost nothing, know what I mean?
Good manners don’t cost nothing, know what I mean?

Reg needed two injections, a local anaesthetic and some antibiotics. He’d been fighting a fox for over an hour the night before and judging by the screams and cat threats coming from the garden, he’d been the one objecting to the fox not showing respect. Good manners don’t cost nothing, do they?

Reg put up with the first injection and waited with all his muscles rigid until the vet turned away to prepare the second syringe. Then slowly, but I knew how serious he was about it, he reached for the vet’s neck with his claws out. He was a cat not a lion, on a surgery table, not on the veldt. I said it was just as well he wasn’t bigger. The vet didn’t mind. He said it was just as well, that some animals, there’s a limit to what they will take and after that as he said, ‘we both know what would happen.’ The same way people in parts of London did when the two demented twins walked the streets the first time.

Secondhand Lions

2ndlions

 

I thought of that story today when I saw a picture of someone feeding presumably tamed cheetahs in their kitchen. It’s not the kind of animal I’d like to argue about who gets the sofa with, but maybe they’ve got lots of sofas. That made me think about those two showbusiness brothers in America who had a house and a circus act full of lions until inevitably, one of the lions wasn’t having it any more. And because I couldn’t remember their name I typed lions and brothers into Google and came up with a film I’d never heard of, Secondhand Lions.

It’s an American film. It’s got Robert Duval from just about everything and Michael “Doors Off” Caine, big box office stars. So let me re-phrase that. It’s a Hollywood film. And if it’s a Hollywood film there are strict rules for the script. It will have a happy ending. It will leave the audience believing that love, mom, Gahd and apple pie will prevail. That good will win and evil will lose. That there is hope and truth and justice and bad things will happen to bad people sooner or later and they’re never happy, really.

But for all that dishonesty it sounds like a good Sunday afternoon film. A misunderstood and lonely boy goes to stay with two old men who seem crusty and useless but really they had an exciting life and both have hearts of gold as well as a cellar full of it. There are filmic crises to keep the audience in the cinema and during one of them Duval responds with a piece of his “What Every Boy Needs to Know…” speech, that the actual truth is not as important as the belief in ideals like good winning over evil, honor, and true love. 

Hollywood. Or Claire and Ben, both believing that in Not Your Heart Away, albeit for different reasons, she because she had to with her whole life falling to pieces and Ben because he thought ‘good’ resided within her jeans.

The moot point is the Oxford comma, the issue of where you put the comma without altering the meaning of a sentence, changing Ella Fitzgerald’s despairing “What Is This Thing Called Love” to the utterly fatuously funny, querulous “What Is This Thing Called, Love?” that Terry Scott or Bernard Cribbins might have sung.

“The belief in ideals like good winning over…..true love.” And sometimes, when things go completely wrong, that’s what happens. And it’s the saddest thing, when you know what had to be done had to be done, that it’s better for the person you love that it was done, but it isn’t going to get you closer to them at all. So maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true. Today, these last few weeks, I don’t know the answer to that any more.

 

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