Should’ve listened when you never said you’d stay.
Hello loneliness I missed you not at all.
Hello just another girl I knew.
Hello memories and snapshots in the rain.
Reading all the writing on the wall.
(I’m reading all the writing on the wall.)
Is someone having a laugh or what?
This is something I wrote just recently for Frances Shelley who asked me if I’d like to do some lyrics. When I got up off the floor I realised it wasn’t a joke at all.
I drew on things that had happened to me; the midnight garden I stepped into once, a long, long time ago, the one that became the garden that Ben stepped into in Not Your Heart Away , as well as my own midnight garden I stepped into here. I thought about something that happened this past summer.
This is what came out. It might come out alright yet. The lyric might be ok with a bit of work too.
Long long ago when the world was young or at least I was, when Latin teachers had actually fought in the Spanish Civil War (unlike Eric Blair, mine tragically wasn’t shot by a Fascist sniper) and university lecturers still awarded marks for Marx, I read Sociology at the University of Bath. I didn’t read much of it, to be honest. Like Ben in Not Your Heart Away I had a head full of ideals and romance, not for anyone in particular, just for the thingness of things. The brightness. The future. The shining plain.
Lenin. We used to go in the same pub. Not at the same time, admittedly.
I didn’t enjoy Sociology. I thought it wasted my time and its own. I didn’t see the point of it. I disliked the earnest mature student middle-class magistrate mums who thought they were contributing to ‘the revolution’ they desired, oblivious to the fact they’d almost certainly have been first against the wall if their revolution went the same way it did in Russia, thanks to a bunch of sociopathic paranoiacs. The biggest joke of all looking back was that not a single one of them realised they were in the middle of the biggest, sickest revolution this country ever went through, back in the early 1980s. But anyway, he typed, wiping the spittle from the laptop screen. Moving on.
I always liked finding things out. I didn’t like the way if an identifiable real incident was referred to that was instantly called ‘anecdotal,’ which was supposed to mean unrepresentative. It wasn’t even tested, just a knee-jerk response, as valid as “Marx for marks” or “greed is good.” Like the selective view of soviet communism, it seemed to be the collective truth that it was the principle that counted, not the facts. If something really happened then it just didn’t. Facts were irrelevant. Reactionary. Not to be trusted.
Things that make you go hmmm
It was a view that coloured my view of the validity of lots of research. Working in commercial research for two decades made me realise that there are plenty of charlatans around and the very biggest ones are too stupid to even realise that they are. You can spot them easily though; they’re the ones with the presentations full of buzz-words, usually ones they don’t actually know what they mean going forward. As Gregory Peck said in Twelve Angry Men, let’s run that up the flagpole and see who salutes it. Or we can throw it out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up.
You can see a problem just from the title. The Old Firm is Rangers v Celtic, Prods v Papes. Quite how two different brands of imaginary friends make you punch your partner in the face (because God wanted it that way?) is a mystery to me but then the Lord moves in a mysterious way. Much like the fans after a bottle of Bucky.
The real issue, the real problem with this research is ‘reported’, because generally, it isn’t. Women make excuses for the people who attack them. They’re embarrassed about staying with them. They’re encouraged to believe it’s their fault. The more it happens the more it happens, because for the woman it becomes a cycle of feeling more and more useless and deserving of being attacked while for men it becomes a self-justifying loop of look-whit-ye-made-me-dae.
That was inappropriate. I am sometimes. It’s certainly not an issue confined to Strathclyde.
But it’s also not an issue that benefits from ‘explanations’ like this. Whatever else I am, I am not stupid. And I have not the first clue what this “Association” (geddit??) graphic is telling me or even what it is supposed to tell me. A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words. But some researchers seem to believe a picture like this proves academic rigour, that the less intelligible a report is, the magically ‘better’ it must be until everyone sings the chorus to The King Is In The Altogether. The emperor is always naked, whatever people flatteringly say.
If you can’t see what it is from this picture, it isn’t saying anything worth saying. It is, as they might say in Strathclyde, a self-righteous havering pile of sh*te.
Here’s what it said:
It was found that the median number of reported domestic incidents was significantly greater in the Old Firm condition, compared with the Old Firm comparator and both Scotland International conditions.
That means more people punch their partner in the face when Celtic are playing Rangers, more than when any other match is on. So why not say it? Bit they havnae finished:
Moreover, there was no statistical difference between the Scotland International and Scotland International comparator conditions. Additional comparisons indicated a statistically significant difference between Old Firm and Scotland International comparator conditions, but none between Scotland International and Old Firm comparator conditions.
Moreover, that is simply repeating the first sentence, unless you want to know that when Celtic play Rangers there’s a difference in the amount of partner-face-punching compared to when Scotland International matches are on, but we’re not told which way, better (less) or worse (more). Sorry, that’s me introducing my disgusting, frivolous anecdotal subjectivity into science. Again.
We are told there is evidence of a link between sporting events and increased levels of domestic violence in wider society (Brimicombe & Café, 2012). Palmer (2011) discusses the role of the “holy trinity” (seeWenner, 1998) of sports, alcohol, and hegemonic masculinity in the context of domestic violence but this minces words.
Other hegemonic masculinity. Of a sort.
How about this? Sport, specifically football, attracts morons who like a fight, especially when they’re drunk. There are no mass fights at rugby matches, or tennis or chess tournaments or even cricket matches, despite the temptation to lump the bathetic Barmy Army. When Celtic are playing Rangers, drunk morons who think their God likes this kind of behaviour like to smack their wives and girlfriends about, more than at other times.
This is not “engaging in hegemonic masculinity.” This is called being a violent, domineering, retarded inadequate. There are other, much shorter words that I know for a fact are often used in Strathclyde. But of course, a proper social researcher could come up with a more academic nomenclature.
I didn’t do well in Sociology. Somehow I just couldn’t see the point of it at all.
I cycled about nine miles to a friend’s farm. We were going to discuss the business plan I’m writing for her, changing her experimental pastoral herd to one that can sustain a modest living for more than just the cows.
It was a sunny, late June evening and the back-from work rush-hour was starting in Butley. There must have been four cars altogether, two behind me and two coming towards me, one of them waiting to turn into the side-road on my left.
It was a little red car, about 15 years old judging by the P-lettered plate. The woman driving it was in her late twenties, a bit tanned, wearing shades with her hair in a top-knot. All the car windows were down and there was music blasting out. I didn’t recognise it at first. You don’t normally hear anything in Butley. When the Butley Oyster was open there used to be old photos on the wall, memories of a time when things ever happened in this tiny, usually silent village.
The pub used to be confused with the Oysterage at Orford, famous for its food and the way when people from London phoned to try to book a table, the landlady, who never, ever served food, thought it was terribly clever and amusing to pretend she’d never heard of the Oysterage and that she had no idea what anyone was talking about. That’s a real old country thing, the satisfaction of saying ‘they couldn’t trick me’ while what they actually did was gave their money to someone else. Odd that the pub is shut now. But like most of Suffolk, despite what the more moronic inhabitants like to pretend, it hasn’t always been like this at all. The photos on the wall of the pub proved it. All of them in black and white, faded with time. One of them showed a crashed Heinkel in a field, a wrecked German bomber surrounded by British policemen, civilians and a man in un buttoned RAF tunic, holding a machine-gun from the aircraft at waist-level, pretending to be Jimmy Cagney over 70 years ago. Oh the fun you can have when you’re young with a uniform and a gun.
Home Guard
The other photo I always noticed was from the same period, when Suffolk expected to be the front line and over-run. Especially this part of Suffolk, just a few miles from Shingle Street. This whole area was off-limits to civilians for most of the war. Whole villages were simply confiscated and everyone told to leave for the duration. Iken was one, where thousands of Allied troops charged up the beaches of the Alde in practice for Normandy. Shingle Street, just a few miles away, was another and to this day, no-one really knows what happened there, nor whether or not there really was a German landing that resulted in hundreds of burned bodies being washed up along the shoreline. The photo showed the local Home Guard unit, the men too old or too young or too infirm for active service, kitted out in their uncomfortable-looking serge uniforms and re-cycled WW1 Lee-Enfield rifles, leftovers from the War to end all Wars. There are lots of sad things about old photos, not least the fact that in any photo seventy years old, its likely that most of the people in the photo are dead. But there was always another sadness about this photo of the halt and the lame. The Home Guard were by definition, the men who didn’t join the regular Army. The sad thing was the number of them in the photo, more old and young, more men unfit for active service than live in the whole village today.
Suffolk more than many rural places has changed more than most. Without any motorways and a farcical, un-commutable railway service that means the 97 mile journey to London takes around two and a half hours, once the farms mechanised there simply wasn’t anything for anyone to do. The farms weren’t the bulwark of society some people still like to pretend. They got rid of the horses, then they rid of the men who worked for them. That got rid of the whole point of most of these villages. The people drifted away, apart from the ones too old to do anything except hang on in a half-life of no work and no-one under 50 until the very end.
The music was still hammering out of the little red car when I recognised what it was the girl with the top-knot and the shades was listening to, a choral version of Jerusalem. One of the weirdest artists and poets who ever lived wrote it, living in the middle of London. I used to walk past where his house had been most days, just round the corner from where Karl Marx lived in a two-room flat writing so passionately about the exploitation of the proletariat that he got his maid pregnant. The song became the anthem of the Labour Party long before Blair re-branded it Tory-Lite (‘I’m Bombin ’ It’™). But it used to mean something, Blake’s Albion, the Labour-landslide 1945 generation’s self-reward for its blood sacrifice twice in what was so obviously not then an average lifetime.
We will not sleep till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
Blake must always have sat uncomfortably with the buttoned-up church folk. Like Dickens, he only once saw a ghost and then one no-one else saw or had ever heard of. He and his wife once sunbathed naked at a time when most decent people didn’t even take their clothes off to wash once a week. And the paintings, the poems about tigers, the rays of sun, the tablets of stone, the amazement and the wonder that radiates from everything this strange man painted and wrote, the power of the imagery and the dark undertow beneath dull little rhymes about diseased roses and flying worms. All of this, belting out of an old Nissan in a country lane one Friday teatime in England’s green and pleasant land.
This was Ben and Claire’s England, Peter and Liz and Teresa’s England in Not Your Heart Away. The magic is still there and like all real magic, it hides. You only find it when you least expect it. But it’s always there, waiting until you can see it again.
Over three weeks ago I ordered broadband from BT. More fool me. Twenty-six years ago BT was privatised, changing it from a publicly-owned monopoly. We were promised this was going to bring more competition. Better service. Trickle-down. If you see Sid, tell him.
All of it was one big con. Twenty-six years later BT is still to all intents and purposes a private monopoly. If you don’t believe that, try getting a line to your house installed by anyone else. If you live somewhere Virgin operates you might be lucky. If you live anywhere else it’s BT or nothing. But surely, the service is better?
Here’s what happened this week. When BT eventually turned up on Friday they couldn’t find out where the junction for the phone line was. Maybe it was on top of a pole. Maybe it was in a box up to two miles away. “The system’ eventually tracked it down to a box somewhere outside Such-And-Such house. Where was that then, the BT man asked?
Here’s the neat little BT logic-loop.
The only way he was able to find the BT junction box was for me to go on the web on my iPhone (O2) to get a map image of where the address was. Luckily the address was the same as a house for sale on Rightmove, so I could even give him a picture of the address he was looking for. Which was just as well because BT couldn’t or wouldn’t help him with this at all. Still, they were only going on as they started – they didn’t tell him how to find my house after I’d given them detailed instructions even down to where to park.
It’s Good To Talk
After two hours on Friday the BT man announced he’d connected it. Great! Er, no, not really. There’s something wrong with the line. Not here. Somewhere. Can’t do anything about it today. Have to log it on Monday. They’ll probably do something about it Wednesday-ish.
But no. Today at about three o’clock I got a text. The phone line is connected. It wasn’t. half an hour later I got another text. Broadband is connected. Make sure you use it, and be aware that of course (of course!) it might be slow or just stop at any time in the next three days. Oh and if it’s like really slow, do make sure you complain up to three months later, but obviously after the cancellation period.
So a pack of lies so far. I called them on the phone. It’s good to talk, Bob Hoskins used to say. Except BT don’t like talking. First they charge you to talk to them on an 0800 number. Because they can. Then a woman with a Scottish voice (which in this house hasn’t always been a mark of harmony and accord but that’s another story) asks you what you want. For example. You might say ‘I haven’t got a phone after you said I had.” And if you do say that she’s very sorry but that isn’t what she’s going to rpely to.
Will you be wanting a phone?
Aye, that’s right enough, hen.
“Well which number are yi calling aboot, ye havering English och sorry, ah fair fergot fer a mumment?”
I don’t know the number. The text said I should dial XXXX (redacted) to get the number, but the line disnae work seh ah cannet.
Och weeel, if ye don’t have a number you’ll no be having a BT connection, so talk tae yer ain provider. See you.
Three times. Then I thought maybe I could fool her. A slim chance, trying to fool a Scottish girl but worth a try. I was desperate now anyway. Maybe if I say I want a phone, that’ll dae ut right enough. Sorry. That might be the answer to this conundrum.
People Who Speak English
I get through. To a call centre. English people. Thousands of them in a tin hut, by the sound of it. “Thank-you for calling BT, the UK’s favourite broadband provider.”
Well it isn’t with me.
I can’t hear you. Is it your phone?
No, I wanted half a hundredweight of Saxon potatoes. Of course it’s my phone.
I can’t hear you. Is it your phone?
No, it’s your call centre.
Explain the problem.
Five calls. Two texts. BT don’t answer texts. Mind you, to be fair they weren’t answering calls either. They have a novel new way of dealing with complaints now. If they don’t like them they just put the phone down. Twice. Would I like to spend two more minutes on my phone bill to explain exactly how satisfied with BT I am? No, actually, thanks awfully for asking. But I do recognise a rigged customer satisfaction survey when I see one. And a third-world service basking in the cosy glow of its protected monopoly, happy in the knowledge it can do as it likes because for all the lying nonsense we were fed when a pubic company was sold off cheap to make money for the government’s chums in banks at the taxpayer’s expense, there actually isn’t any competition at all. If you see Sid, tell him.
And in a little postscript, the next day I phoned again. I got an Indian man on the end of the phone and winced, waiting for his half-English excuses. He fixed the whole problem of no phone connection courteously and politely, in fifteen minutes, most of which was me running up and down stairs. As I’d just swum a kilometre I had already got my quota of exercise for the day. That’ll make up for my birthday tomorrow then. If it works like that.
I read this a long time ago, in a desert far away. I was about Ben’s age in Not Your Heart Away. A girl sat on an abandoned tractor one night with the wind blowing her hair while I read the poem aloud from the book she carried. Those sentences tell you probably all you need to know about who we were, then. The feeling’s stayed with me ever since, inside me head. Not that one, the one that took us out to the abandoned tractor to talk, as people used to say (‘let’s go somewhere we can talk…’) but the book thing, the stage-prop, the lever, the excuse, the poem, that’s stayed with me.
Walking with blue
Rudolf Hess. Nutter. Do not confuse the two.
I’ve spent the day going through old notebooks, trying to write songs, remembering old dreams. And then I found this. It should not have become my song, the song of my life or if it had to not then, when I was nineteen. There might be a time for this in people’s lives, maybe particularly if they’re German. If you’ve lost a world war or two. If you’ve got one too many duelling scars from Heidelberg. If you’re a short dark painter who can’t paint very well and live in a bedsit with people like Christopher Isherwood flitting about. But not when you’re a teenage British kid into Magazine and Kate Bush, wearing black cords and red Kickers, just off to university. What was wrong with me? What, you know, was it?
I, like, didn’t know who I was. Well, big news. I still don’t. A bit more, a bit more than then perhaps. But as the other bladerunner said at the end of the film, the one who wasn’t Harrison Ford, the one who hadn’t fallen in love with a mechanical blow-up doll, the one who’d found out they were programmed to fall to bits in a couple of years because it was all too much for them, then again, who does?
I’ve never felt I had a home, more than for about an hour or two. People have tried to make me feel that, truly tried, but it didn’t stick. Or maybe I didn’t stick. It’s not a big noble born under a wandering star thing, just this no permanence is mine thing. I’d like it to be. I don’t think it’s going to happen now.
Years ago there was a film. Bob Hoskins, the Singing Detective, the uber-geezer in The Long Good Friday, the friendly bloke from the BT ads who told us it was good to talk fell into a cartoon as a 1940s gum-shoe, a private eye trying to find-out Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Prime suspect was Jessica Rabbit, a smouldering torch singer with a figure to die for and Bob thought Roger probably had. She was trouble. You could see that a mile away. A voice that would smoke tarmac when she said: “I’m not really bad. I’m just … drawn that way.” That was me.
“I’m not bad. I’m just….drawn that way.”
Not Jessica Rabbit, you understand. I’ve never poured myself into a ball gown. Poured people out of them, but that’s a different thing altogether. (“That’s a different thing.” Thank-you.)
But that thing, the longing forever for the right to stay. I know that feeling. It has nothing to do with mortgages or arrears or where you live or passports or visas. People like us now, we do so many different things. You can call it a portfolio career if it helps. I’ve cooked crepes, shot things, explained things, found things, made things, written things and yes, I crave a form that binds, a certainty, a constancy. And at the same time I avoid it as if it was contagion incarnate, as if it burned my eyes.
I should never have found this poem. I should never have found this poem again. But it didn’t change my life. It just articulated some of it.
Well, that was the second Lifeboat Party show at www.radiocastle.com I did on Monday. The general consensus is still camp, but slicker.
You can listen to it again wherever you are in the world by just clicking here and judge for yourselves. I got my very most favourite fan laughing even though I didn’t get the thing in about the Suffolk Space Programme.
That aluminium silo on that farm outside Wickham Market? Oh come on!! You didn’t think that was farm stuff did you? It’s for an ICBM the Americans left when they abandoned Bentwaters airbase in 1992. We’ve used it to put farmers into space out here for the last 15 years, after we worked out how to turn the methane in battery chicken poo into rocket fuel. Townies. They don’t know nuffin…
Early September, the fruiting time, with plum juice and warmth and wasps in the air, when you know the summer is fading and the cold is coming. You can smell it in the air in the evening, in the morning now too. And think of times colder. Cold is different wherever you go. I remember the white cold of Norway that March I went there, rivers still hidden under feet of snow that lay on the ice., all the contours of the earth smooth and flowing. The other cold I found there too, when I went out without a hat and got caught in the rain, so cold it made me think I might die.
And the cold of the West Country, those mornings when I was young and we had no heat in the house until the fire was lit, apart from the choking paraffin heater at the bottom of the stairs that sent fumes into my room while I was asleep; a sort throat from November to March. Ice ferns on the windows inside, astonishing skies orange and yellow and pale blue with no clouds, as if all of Wiltshire was flying through space, so high above the earth in my council house bedroom, the concrete tiled rooftops, the sodium streetlights. My crystal radio with its wire loop of aerial strung around the front door porch. I haven’t felt that cold since then, since I left the place where I came from.
A different kind of cold out here in the East. A sadder one as the year spins into its last part, towards the long night. And one where now the summer is over the people have gone back to their real lives, leaving this pretend holiday place still bathing in the cooling waters of the retirees mantra: ‘it’s always been like this,’ as if a place was ever built where six out of ten houses are lived in only now and then.
I dreamed a mouse was trapped in the bin where I keep the chicken’s corn. In my dream I tip the bin slowly so the little mouse can escape. Yellow and orange mist as I leave the house this morning. Figs from the tree I planted half a decade ago this sweet Autumn. There are much worse times than these.
The picture at the top of this blog has attracted some comments over the months it’s been up. Where is it? Haunting. Beautiful.
Southwold
It was taken near the harbour mouth at Southwold either late in 2012 or early, very early, this year, 2013, on an iPhone, looking north, towards the pier. It had been raining heavily and there’d been a storm so there was a shallow lagoon on the beach, the water in the photo. I haven’t been there many times since.
By chance
Someone was walking along to give the shot some depth and perspective. I don’t know who. I never shall.
Would it have been a better picture without anyone in it? I think the person locates it, gives it something that however beautiful and haunting that place is, would have been totally lacking without that one single, apparently insignificant person.
Because that’s the thing about insignificant people. They aren’t. Nobody is.
About a thousand years ago, or in the 1980s which sometimes feels like much the same thing, there was a superb show on the radio called A Prairie Home Companion. Way back when jihad was just something the Dukes of Hazzard used to say I travelled around the prairie, and that ain’t no lie. I got caught in a prairie lightning storm outside Colby, Kansas, sleeping in my old Chevrolet while I went to hunt Hunter Thompson, but that’s a whole other story. The whole point of the Prairie Home Companion is that nothing much happens on it, which is much the same as what happens on the prairie and if you think it’s easy to make that sound realistic on the radio, think again.
Lifeboat Party
It was my first live radio show today. The Lifeboat Party went out on www.Radio Castle.com at noon. Come February it’s going on old fashioned radio as well as out as a web broadcast, so I can really put the F in FM.
So today I’d cycled out to the auctions at half past nine to see what was happening, see whether my friend with the live milk farm was there (she was), see if there were any bicycles I could buy and sell on eBay to Japan (there weren’t, but it did happen once) and to see if friends from the village really were going to buy some chickens at the livestock auction.
Tracks Of My Tears
Well, they meant to. It’s about comfort zones. What you’re used to. The bidding started on a cardboard box containing four Light Sussex chicks. Hardly anyone bid. They went for £2. No, all four for £2. The person I knew was going to bid on some hens. He’s got a sensible, responsible job where he needs to keep control of a lot of different things going off at the same time. And he froze, bidding on a chicken.
When I cycled on to Framlingham my show was about the same. The first ten minutes were fine. My guest came in and if I got the name of her company wrong it was sort-of ok. It was after that, when the mixing deck froze so I could only play CDs and I couldn’t remember which CD was in which rack and …..
And.
Looking Counter Clockwise
Ok. Nobody in Suffolk would know the difference between the Gotan Project and Federico Aubelle at noon on a back-to-school Monday anyway. But I do. And I need to do it better next time. Rabbit in headlights. Moth to a flame. You know, I’d sell my soul for total control.
The trouble with life is all the stuff that goes with it. Household repairs. Irritating, upsetting, unsettling letters saying you have to do someone else’s job for them to sort out a mess they’ve made on the basis of their assumptions and if you don’t it’s your fault and no, don’t ever ring them again because they aren’t going to answer the phone. And that’s just the tax office.
It gets in the way. I haven’t written anything for weeks. It’s making me wonder who I am. Was the book any good? I was told the other day it was boring.
‘But you said it was well-written?’
‘Yes. It is. But it’s boring. Nothing happens.’
And then you’re straight into I don’t think that’s true and it’s not supposed to be an action-thriller and sometimes stuff happens when things don’t actually happen and I’m not walking out on you I’m just going for a cigarette and would you like a drink when you get back. All that stuff.
And getting my first radio show ever in the world and learning to work the decks (I know. Get me. And my posse, as I believe it’s called). And going for interviews to start a training course and finding I liked the one I didn’t expect to like much more than the other one, which is much better in some ways and has a better reputation but also has a much higher commuting bill attached to it.
And going to a wedding. I’ve never met the bride. I last saw the groom five years ago or thereabouts. He was something to do with a tango show in Yeovil. A girl I had one date with 15 years before was there. I didn’t recognise her now she was 40 and dressed in weird woolen clothes of a style I’d only seen in Miss Marple films. Odd.
So all of that stuff and other things and the end of summer and what to wear to this wedding which isn’t in a church. It might have been better if I hadn’t picked up the shirt I was going to wear just after I’d fixed an old bicycle I was out riding this morning.
It’s still sunny, just cool enough to make cycling brilliant. The roads were empty, this rural Saturday. A peaceful, calm morning and the promise of better weather to come. I hope the wedding is the same.
But it’s also not an issue that benefits from ‘explanations’ like this. Whatever else I am, I am not stupid. And I have not the first clue what this “Association” (geddit??) graphic is telling me or even what it is supposed to tell me. A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words. But some researchers seem to believe a picture like this proves academic rigour, that the less intelligible a report is, the magically ‘better’ it must be until everyone sings the chorus to 
