My Other Stuff – Page 18 – Writer-insighter

It’s a guy thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only once a year

Somehow it's not quite me. — Somehow it’s not quite me, is it?

It was a line from a John Otway song. Get ready for the festival, for the festival is only once a year. Raises your glasses in the air and fill the barrels full of beer.

I’ve always liked John Otway and there are more festivals around than there used to be. I know me festies. I went to Stonehenge once, man. It was utter rubbish. A naked woman I’d never met woke me up to ask if I would trade cigarette papers I had for oranges she had, but I didn’t actually want an orange at the time. I still wonder if she got what she was looking for, sometimes.

IMG_2177 - Version 4 — A spoken word fan. No, I was quite surprised too, actually.

My first ‘Welcome Back Tour’ date was at the Golden Key at Snape, here in Suffok, a place I’ve grown quite fond of since a gig there in mid-April which changed my life in totally unexpected ways. Some woman on her first post-baby holiday with her husband poured cocktails down me while he got more and more pissed off after my set until an even more so-stunning-there’s-no-way-she’s-interested-in-me woman deftly and literally shut the door on the cocktail buyer. Let’s just say some people really do appreciate spoken word.

So anyway, in what’s turning into being a bit of a year although thankfully not in the way last year did (oh hi, no, I didn’t mean you. You were quite a nice bit of it, mostly, so there’s no need to send someone round to my house again, like last time. Either of you.) odd stuff is happening. The oddest soonest thing is I’m doing some spoken word back up for Jan Pulsford, sharing her set at Petta Fiesta. I’ve stood on a stage in front 200 people who didn’t like what I was saying before, but that was wearing a suit, so this should be fine. It’s just I didn’t, back in January when I did my first ever set at The Anchor in Woodbridge, have it in my head that half a year from then I’d be asked by someone really famous and unarguably brilliant at what they do to do some of my stuff with them. It still comes as a surprise.

So I think I need a stage name. I’ve experimented with Alphonse D’Obermann but it doesn’t seem to stick. I like it but nobody gets the joke, if that’s what it is. I quite like Serious Voice, after I saw a poster for a band called Serious Face. Wonder if that would work? And how are they going to get the helicopter to take me to the gig and back down in the potato field opposite my house with those phone lines in the way?

Somehow I don’t think the organisers are going to quite stretch to a heli. But it’s still a festival. And I don’t have to pay. Come and see me if you’re around next weekend. It’ll be fun. Probably. Bring a mac though. You know, at our age and everything.

Bunged up

I haven’t done any open mic nights or any other performance for a couple of weeks. And I’m getting antsy about it.

About three weeks ago, but maybe four, I got what I thought was hayfever. I haven’t had hayfever this bad for years, not just the sneezing (but suspiciously not much of that) and sore throat but eyes full of crud every morning as well as being itchy all day long and that horrible feeling in my legs as if I’ve had a massive electric shock and that never very pleasant pain in the kidneys. And a cough. And a really sore throat. And feeling tired all the time.

I don’t generally get ill, no more than one cold a year, but this was a big one. The net result has been I’ve gone temporarily deaf in one ear, which is ringing out white noise all the time anyway. It means I can’t hear how loud I am and I can’t accurately hear my own voice full stop.

So all in all, it’s not great for performing. I’m a little concerned about it, because I was enjoying doing it and the three-piece band that seem to have assembled behind me were really getting it together and transforming the spoken word stuff I do into something very much better.

That and the police. Last time I went to Woodbridge I got breathalysed. That was fine. I don’t drink and drive, or not over the limit, anyway. But although the breathalyser thing tested nil alcohol, which was odd in itself as I’d had two small glasses of red wine so it should have shown something, there were a lot of odd things about the whole stop, as we road-warrior non-criminals call it. So much so that a friend whose husband was a police officer until he was killed told me ‘it’s not what you think it is. Watch out.’

Back when I lived in Trowbridge a policeman saw a police van parked up at the side of the road so he went over for a chat, tapped on the window and found it wasn’t Gary Robbins’ dad, the PC who usually had the van. It was someone else entirely. Someone not actually in the police. And it wasn’t a police van either. As things got odder and odder at the side of the road I remembered all that happening and wondered if it was the same thing. My friend refusing to say what it was if it wasn’t what I thought it was in a Facebook private message creeped me out a bit too.

So that’s why I haven’t done any spoken word recently. I’m bunged up. But for the moment at least I’m not banged up too.

Diversity training

As a skive from real work today I was booked into a diversity training course. We didn’t have diversity when I was at school. Or rather we did, but we didn’t know about it.

There were precisely two black children at my school, out of 1300 pupils. There was one black child at primary. Also at primary there were two sisters, called Miriam and Rebecca who had very sallow skin and dark hair and like their parents, kept themselves very much to themselves in rooms sectioned off from a friend’s grandmother’s terraced house. I went there just once. It was mid-afternoon and the window curtains were part drawn, as if they were hiding from something.

Looking back, I don’t think I was particularly stupid not to realise that of course they were. The war they’d fled from back then wasn’t even as long ago as the Miner’s Strike is now. It also explained why my school was full of kids called things like Geno Petrillo, Chris Kozlowski and Bozenka Kalinka. The airfield up the road where we rode our FS1E mopeds was a refugee camp for Poles just after the war ended. Geno’s dad almost certainly came to live in Wiltshire, like the Difazio family who had motorbike shops, like the ice-cream van man, because there was also a massive PoW camp for Italians nearby.

I say ‘almost certainly’ because I don’t know. Because it was never talked about and we never asked. I found a paperback at a jumble sale once, about a Polish Spitfire squadron and no adults felt like telling me any more than that there was one. And that was it. We had a Polish deli that was nothing like anything I expected from films about New York. That was our integration. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. It’s nothing to do with you where anyone came from, Bennett. You came from Stratford-on-Avon, not Wiltshire. You, Joyce, came from London. Whitmarsh, Kent. Anyone else wants to play where are you from? I didn’t hear you. Right. Let’s get on. Mr Bertillon, le duanier, est arivee encore. Aven une sange.

Notwithstanding my impeccable diversity credentials, I managed to balls it up anyway.

My breakout session was supposed to be in a place called the Stour Room, named after the Suffolk river. I’m not feeling too great after lots of late, late nights (no, sorry, not going into any details there) and an epic dose of hayfever that obviously assumed I was doing O-Levels so it could totally mess my life up instead of just having a go at the past week.

I wasn’t sure where the Stour Room was so I asked the first person I could find. She happened to be black but that had nothing to do with what happened next. Her accent was pure Essex.

Me: Excuse me, do you know where the Stour Room is?

Woman: The which, sorry?

Me: The Stour Room.

I’ve got hayfever and I can’t hear properly, so I can’t really hear how loud my voice is or what it sounds like.

Woman: Oh! The Stower Room!

Me: Yes, the Stour Room.

Woman: You say Star!

Me: Well no, but I’m not from Suffolk.

Woman: I say Stower. I am.

Me: Well…

Woman: I say Stower, because I’m common.

I couldn’t really see where all this was going. I wasn’t feeling great. I’ve had ringing in my left ear for four day now. All I wanted to do was find the room I was supposed to be in, not ask her out or anything. So it wasn’t really my fault what happend next.

Me: No, it’s not that.

Total silence.

You can’t take words back. I almost added “I mean, I didn’t mean that’s what makes you… I mean, I’m sure you’re not….. oh look, hares mating outside the window” I wanted to try that last one because then I could have run away and hidden, rather than inevitably being paired with the poor woman in team building exercises for the rest of the afternoon.

However you were, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you common. You did start it though. And I’ve not been well. Sorry. No, really.

P.S. I just tried to post this on Reddit, under Diversity. But apparently I’m not allowed to. Maybe I’m not diverse enough, or something.

The point of the panga

Simon Kuper wrote in the FT today (April26th 2014) about inequality being the new apartheid and how unfondly he remembered the old one back in South Africa.

“I remember white South African liberals bemoaning apartheid while their black maid served supper. Most of them didn’t want to end apartheid. They just liked liberal talk.”

I grew up in times I used to think were different to now, but the older I get the more I don’t think they are at all. There were 1200 children at my school. Two were black. I don’t know if that’s changed and this wasn’t some elite fee-paying school, just the ordinary school in an ordinary West Country town. There just weren’t many black people there, it was as simple as that. There weren’t many opportunities for integration for that reason too. It wasn’t that we weren’t into multi-culturalism. We just didn’t have a multiplicity of cultures.

This is a panga. It's about as remarkable as a Swiss Army knife in South Africa. — This is a panga. It’s about as remarkable as a Swiss Army knife in South Africa.

But the kids whose parents had come down from London set out to cure all of that. Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part were taken as part-documentary, part training film. The unbelievable Um Bongo advert (Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo just in case your memory, hopefully, has blotted it out) was sung with gusto in the swimming pool changing rooms, that hot-bed of closet gayness where masculinity was supposed to be demonstrated by staring at and commenting on the size of other people’s cocks.

It was a different time. Maybe. People now beginning to think about retiring from Thatcher-fuelled careers in accountancy but also actuaries, doctors and builders alike all happily larded conversations with words Nigel Farage probably says to his bathroom mirror. A sentence that didn’t include the word coon or wog was a sentence wasted according to one graduate of the London School of Economics, to my certain knowledge.

But I also met someone at university whose family had managed to get themselves asked to leave South Africa for being too white liberal by the apartheid government. I was reminded about her when I read Simon Kuper.

She told me about the time when after standing up for the blicks to the extent the government didn’t like it, that Swapo or Zanu or someone decided to raid her parents’ house, waiting for her father to come home. Because they were opposed to discrimination they didn’t have a gun in the house. And also because they’d planned in advance he drove past; they left an innocent-looking postcard in the window next to the front door. If it was safe to come in you took the card down. If the card was up you didn’t go in the house. The card was up.

The raiders got bored and took themselves and their pangas away. Her father and the whole family lived to get out of South Africa another day.

I asked what had happened to the cook, the gardener and the pool boy.

“Oh, they wint thir.’

They were taken by Zanu or Swapo or whoever it was?

“Nah, they knew it was going to hippen. It’s wit they’re lak.”

Pity. I’d quite liked her before that.

Start Monday

After a long time scrabbling around to pay the bills I’ve finally found a paid job that will do that and quite a lot more, allowing me to continue to do the things I like doing. The things I seem to be able to do in a way that people seem to like, and things I’m getting better at.

I went up for the interview a week ago today, a Tuesday. We spent half the interview talking about the shortcomings of rigid processes and a lot of time talking about bicycles.

It was something I’d put on my CV, how one of my ambitions was to afford a Pedersen. What’s a Pedersen? Is this an interview or something?

Long, long ago, before there were even cars, a man called Mr Pedersen was Danish but he had the misfortune to live in Dursley. I know. But let’s get on. He built a bicycle, lots of them, out of wood, sometimes. They weren’t like ordinary bicycles. Instead of one basic rectangle on the slant-shaped frame (look, I didn’t do well at maths at school, ok? I can do it now, pretty well, but I don’t know the names of shapes. Rhomboid? Maybe? Anyway…) with a saddle perched on the top, the Pedersen bicycle has made up of loads of even more slanty rectangles, with much thinner metal tubes holding it all together, with no saddle at all. Instead, the rider half stood, half sat in a leather sling.

For lots of reasons, Pedersens turned out a lot faster and more comfortable than the standard ‘safety’ bicycle. Maybe because the rider’s stomach isn’t cramped up so the lungs can expand more easily, maybe because with a straight posture you can get more power out of your thigh muscles and into the pedals – I don’t know. But they won so many races that they were banned from racing, which along with a bit of financial embarassment pretty much finished the company. Mr Pedersen invented a milking machine, being a handy sort and went back to Denmark and there the story might have ended.

Except it rather wonderfully didn’t. Back in about 1970 a Danish blacksmith found one of these old bikes and in the spirit of the times, thought he’d start making them. He opened a workshop (ok, a shed then) in an abandoned military barracks in Copenhagen that people were starting to call Christianaland and did exactly that.

The utterly wonderful Pedersen bicycle I can't afford. — The utterly wonderful Pedersen bicycle I can’t afford.

And people bought them. They weren’t cheap, at about 1,000 Euros each, but they were and are great. I rode one once. So did a friend of mine whose idea of a nice bicycle was one with four wheels and an engine and a heater and a roof and a good CD player and leather seats. She was away for 20 minutes, which made the man in the pub whose bike we’d been talking about more than a bit agitated. She got back and described a route she’d taken that must have been covered about 20% faster than you’d comfortably be able to on a normal bike and trust me, she didn’t do cycle racing.

“I want one of those,’ was the first thing she said as she handed the bike back to the owner.

“I’d like that one, please,’ was the first thing I said in the shop when I found an insulated steel cup with a screw-top lid that will be ideal for the commute immediately after the interview. I’m usually rubbish about interviews, in large part because I often end-up talking about bicycles and things.

Anyway, all this stuff seems to have got me a job. Which means I can now have weekends completely free from worry about how I’m going to afford to go to open mic gigs on Friday and Saturday nights. Ok, I’m going to have to commute, but I’m working on a car/folding bike/train arrangement that I think will work out pretty well, especially as summer’s coming.

Now I’d better get on with polishing shoes and ironing some shirts. And I need some more hangers for them. And I suppose I’d better finish this stage version of the play what I wrote, now that Eastern Angles want a serious look at it with a view to producing it. There’s always something, isn’t there? Wish me luck.

Through the looking glass

Stupidly, because I might have expected it, page 60 of the Daily Mail March 28th 2014 was an entire page that managed to turn a book review into the author’s fears about the end of the world. Taking his work home with him, John Preston claimed that it often keeps him awake at night, or specifically, worrying about what he will do when the horde of illegal benefit-claiming job-stealing immigrants have given cats TB because we didn’t shoot all the badgers. It’s EU political correctness gone mad.

His biggest worry wasn’t that the world would end – if it was he wouldn’t have got the job at the Mail – but that he wouldn’t be able to cope with the consequences. Being a Daily Mail person he didn’t bother to do anything to solve the problem by learning how to sew or make a fire for example, but by mangling the language a bit further while saying how terrible it all was.

“Let’s say a terrible pandemic has decimated most of the population,” he gushed. I know this is a favourite Daily Mail fantasy, but let’s stop it right there.

Nothing can decimate most of anything for one simple reason: decimate means reducing something by a tenth. Unless John Preston is stratifying the population, which presumably he’d do along the lines of strivers and scroungers, the sentence is gibberish, like most of the rest of the paper.

Given that he wrote ‘most of the population’ he can’t be stratifying in any major sense. Instead, he’s simply conflating his own ignorance and the desire to use big words to imply he’s really clever and making more of a mockery of his newspaper than presumably the editor also intended.

Decimated does not mean devastated. Yes, it sounds similar. But it’s a different word. For a good reason: it means something else. This is what words are for. Meaning something. Not whatever you want them to mean, or you might as well strawberry blancmange.

It was the Romans, as it so often is in our progressive country. I’m not even going near the arsy ‘no, it’s about the practice of executing one man in ten in a mutinous Roman legion.’ I don’t know if it also means that or not, but it’s irrelevant.

Decimus means ten. In Latin. That’s what it means. No more, no less. Ten. So decimate has to mean reduce by a tenth, whether it’s Roman soldiers, survivors of the apocalypse or eggs in a basket. What it doesn’t mean is destroy a lot of.

There were no WMDs Tony. None. As You Knew.

I blame Tony Blair, a bit but not entirely like the Daily Mail. At least he’d obviously read some Victorian literature when he was at Oxford.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Through the Looking Glass.

No Batteries Required

Listen to No Batteries Required here.

At the very end of 2012 I was siting in a pub talking to a man they call The Sausage King. I hadn’t wanted to ask for him by name in The Crown in Framlingham, but luckily I recognised him anyway. Which was something of a relief.

His hobby was and is sausages. For about ten years he’s been blogging about them before anybody else had. He rides a motorcycle around the countryside finding sausages and talking to people about them, writing books about them and making films about them. Because he does.

I’d had a food business and thankfully got rid of it before it got rid of me. Just. So we got talking, as you do, because although I came not to like or be much interested in the business, apart from getting rid of it, I’m extremely interested in food, where it’s come from and people who are interested in it. At the end of the second pint the bad thing happened. I had an idea. I’d known some stuff, as you do, the things I call the bones of the idea, the skeleton the meat hangs on.

The Bones

1) Battery cages for egg-laying chickens were banned on 1/1/2012. By March DEFRA, the government body that looks after farming, found that some chicken farmers weren’t complying with the law, so they set-up a special body to go and talk to them about why they should. If you try this with your road fund licence, saying that you don’t see why you should pay it and anyway you haven’t got enough money to buy one, then you get a criminal record and a fine. If you’re a farmer, DEFRA sets up a dedicated unit to explain the idea to you.

2) Kirsty Alsop was rumoured to be going to be made a government Minister by David Cameron if he won the election in 2010.

3) David Cameron and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall went to Eton and Oxford together.

Eton College class of 2000. I do not know anybody in the picture and resisted the temptation to make-up names like Oliver "Trumpy" Farlingaye-Bligh. — Eton College class of 2000. I do not know anybody in the picture and resisted the temptation to make-up names like Oliver “Trumpy” Farlingaye-Bligh.

4) Kirsty Alsop is Cath Kidston’s cousin. People like that know each other, one way or another. For a long time I used to know lots of people on the periphery of that world, which is one reason I sort-of-know-of-but-not-very-well lots of people, but not enough to be made a Cabinet Minister, unfortunately.

5) People in public office are well protected, however man-of-the-people they might appear to be. I remember being on a crowded commuter train in Blackheath Standard one morning with my face jammed into someone’s armpit. It didn’t smell. Much more scarily, it was hard with distinct edges. I didn’t ask to actually see the gun the big bloke in the nondescript suit was wearing, but I didn’t really think I needed to. He was like the man I talked to in the Sloaney Pony one evening back when the world was young, who looked like a librarian. Some girl had just been making fun of how boring he was and his dull job in the Civil Service before she swung her hips out onto the Green. He was in the Diplomatic Protection Group. Looking boring was his job. During the day there was a Sterling submachine gun under his mac.

The Idea

Wouldn’t it be funny if a chicken farmer went nuts because he was going broke and decided it was all Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s fault so he’d go and shoot him? Wouldn’t it be funnier if he did that the same day the Prime Minister decided to go and make his old school chum Minister of Food? What would happen if that happened?

And the consequence was, of course, that you have to actually write the thing once you say you will.

So I did. It became No Batteries Required, a half-hour play for voices that was the only thing I’ve ever written that kept the same title it started off with. I wrote Act One and got stuck, then four months later did the other Four Acts in about a week.

I sent it to the BBC who didn’t want it, so I found some local actors who did and we recorded it by coincidence again at The Crown in Framlingham, in the middle of December 2015, the day I was moving house. It wasn’t the best timing.

Then the difficult part, the sound editing. I didn’t have anyone to do it for me and like any of these things the first one is the worst and most challenging, because there’s a lot to learn. Even the most basic things in editing seem like huge hurdles until somehow, some time, you suddenly can’t remember when you couldn’t do them, or what all the fuss was about.

There are some things about the recording that can’t be fixed, because it was done on an iPhone (surprisingly good recording quality on those things, in fact) but we hadn’t thought to put it on airplane mode, so although the ringer was put on silent when a call did come in that next-to-the-radio dippada-dippada-dippada dip noise is all over the recording if you listen for it.

No celebrity chefs were harmed in the production of this play.

I used several tracks to record the different sounds and voicesand some are mixed too loud and some too soft. I sorted out most of the times I clipped words too shortbut there are probably still some there and there is rubbish left over at the very, very end of the recording after a two-minute silence. Other than that it’s fabulous.

Now I have to try to edit it again.

The PIN code was the funny thing. I made-up the least likely thing I could think of, the idea that when you’re stressed out of your head being attacked by terrorists and as the security services have all been privatised you’d have to remember not just a special phone number to dial but a PIN as well. A friend in the police read it through for accuracy and looked at me a bit oddly, even for someone in the police.

“How did you know about the PIN number?’

Apparently it’s not really secret secret, but it was odd that I knew about it. I didn’t guv. It’s a fit-up. It’s all porkies, like most of the stuff I write. And I’ve got to turn this into a screenplay now if that will be all, officer, because Cascade Studios said they want a look at it. Which is nice.

Chickens seem to be in the news at the moment. Or French porn movies anyway, which is arguably better.

Listen to No Batteries Required here.

Truth, Licence & Total Fiction

A tortured course

I went to this wedding once, like you do. It was alright. The groom was a mate and the bride looked pretty fit in that dress. We all said in the car-park. Lucky bloke. So anyway, I’d gone out for a smoke in the churchyard just before the end of it and this old bloke out there started on about how he’d been in the navy.

Sam Coleridge. The coolest droog that ever lived in the West Country. Probably. — Coleridge. Almost too cool to read at school.

And that was the thing. He wouldn’t stop talking.

He was going on about how they were on this ship somewhere it was really cold, up in the Artic or somewhere, when this massive bird flew over and landed on this ship he was on and they give it some chips. Then it started coming back for more chips all the time until he was a bit pissed one day, this old bloke and he shot it. Then all this bad stuff kicked off on the ship and all his mates blamed him for killing the albatross and he had to wear it round his neck for I don’t know, years. Well, months then. I couldn’t really follow it by then, it all got weird. I reckon he was on something. He didn’t talk like he was right in the head. But the way he said it all, I had to listen to the end. It didn’t make sense, all of it, but it was the way he said it. It was like I’d had a bang on the head or something when he’d finished.

Except it didn’t happen

Recognise the plot? It’s long-term substance abuser with addiction issues Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner. The voice is similar to the way people spoke in the same area Colerdidge lived but when I was growing up there. Similar to but different. As Marlowe and Pinter nearly said, the past is another country and besides, it’s all made up.

Facts get blurred in fiction. Or to un-confuse that thought, when you write stuff you take ideas, and being human and being lazy everyone I’ve ever heard of starts off writing about something that happened to them. Then they alter it. The thing that really happened could be anything, a major thing in your life like a car-crash or your parents’ death, or remembering utterly trivial, like tasting the madeleine biscuits that were the key to Proust’s past, or seeing a child’s footprints in the snow one day.

Because it’s fiction

Some people restore old cars. Years ago there was a film called Two Lane Blacktop. Two long-haired hippie weirdo freaks as they used to be called, have this old 1955 Chevrolet they stripped-down and souped-up and they go around the country doing illegal races for money. Then they meet this girl, like you do. She sleeps with one of them. But then the other one fancies her a bit but nothing really happens but then they meet this older bloke and get in a bet with him about whose car is fastest and she gets in his car and the race becomes not just about the money or cars. Sort of. Maybe. Or it could be about Vietnam in some unexplained way, the way you have to say every American film of the 1970s was.

Fair turned moi 'ead it did, an' all like. — The car and sort-of-star in Two Lane Blacktop. Fair turned moi ‘ead it did an’ all like, that film did. In my experience her expression simply means ‘my jeans are much too tight.’

Whatever. As some people clearly get confused about fact and fiction I’ll let you into a secret. Although that might really have happened and I’ve no evidence one way or the other, here’s a total 100% fact. It didn’t happen to Will Cory who wrote the film and got $100,000 for doing it, or the actors in it. Or that way. Or then. If it happened at all. The film was made in 1971. Back in the 1960s Will Cory had travelled across America. Yes, people really did wear denim shirts without being ironic. And *gasp* sometimes they even went to bed with each other without being married and *faint* sometimes someone else would have liked to do that with one of the people involved and didn’t know exactly how to say that. I know! Who’d have thought it? But it still didn’t really happen. Because it’s a film. Are you getting the hang of this yet?

Still confused? Ok. Again in the 1950s a company called Plymouth made a car called the Fury. Because they did. In America. Anyway, this car’s about 20 years old when this kid at school bought it to do up, except the more involved he gets with the car it’s as if it changes him. As he repairs the old car until it looks like new this kid becomes withdrawn, humourless and cynical, but at the same time more confident and self-assured. But that’s quite enough about me. Oh look! See what I did there?

That’s the basic plot of Steven King’s book/film/bank balance adjuster Christine. Two boys like the same girl at school. One of them gets this old car. Except the car is an elemental that kills people when nobody’s driving it and I’ve said too much already. Good film. Except that didn’t happen either.

Once he had some money Steven King liked to restore old cars, like the 1958 Plymouth Fury in the film. Or not like. The real 1958 Fury was only made in white, not red. The one in the book had four doors, the one in the film and the real one only two. One day Mr King had a thought. What if the milometer ran backwards, the way everyone used to say car dealers wound it back to make it look newer? What if that really happened? What if there’s this ghost or evil spirit in the car and as the milometer runs backwards it really does get new again?

Really good. Except it isn't true. — Really good. Except it isn’t true.

Sorry, but I’m going to have to spoil it all now. That never really happened either. Except bits of it did.

Here’s the clue. Steven King probably did stand there with a busted old milometer and wound it back just for a laugh before he had a good look at how it fitted back in and ordered a new one from the parts catalogue. Almost certainly. Totally certainly, his car didn’t repair itself while he did it.

So is Christine ‘about’ Steven King’s restoration project? Is Two Lane Blacktop ‘about’ Will Cory’s road trip? Is Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner ‘about’ having your Saturday ruined when you thought you were going for a serious drink with your mates and end-up talking to this old bloke about albatrosses?

Bits. Sort of. But not really. From an idea. From something that did really happen, but not the way it got written, because writing it does what writing always does, it changes the real into the unreal, for effect, for a story, for fun.

So next time anyone has a couple of drinks after work and comes to my door demanding I don’t do any more poetry because they know who it’s about and they’re watching me in future, or someone else asks me online why a poem shows a me full of self-pity and how come as that’s not the me they know and have I got a split personality or something, allow me to commend to you Two Lane Blacktop, Christine and The Ancient Mariner. All based on things that really did happen. A bit. But whisper who dares as Christopher Robin put it: not exactly the way they came out when they were written.

Sorry to have to break it to you. It’s like Father Christmas. But that’s why fiction exists, to make real life more interesting. To parabel-ise if that’s a thing. To entertain. But fiction isn’t fact. Poetry isn’t a documentary. It’s about themes, the sorts of things that happen to everybody, that people recognise, which is why people can relate to them. What it isn’t is an authentic record. Actors, someone reading aloud, didn’t really have those things happen. Things are either fiction or they are not. And when you’re dealing with life, separating fact and fiction is important.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

The Marine, whose eye is bright,

Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone: and now the Wedding Guest

Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man,

He rose the morrow morn.

Postscript

And if you’re wondering why that all seems a bit familiar, it might be that this is that you’re thinking of:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

All Things Bright is probably the best remembered of Mrs Alexander’s 1848 Hymns For Little Children, published considerably after The Ancient Mariner and Mrs Alexander probably wouldn’t thank you for saying she nicked the idea from mostly out-of-his-head-but-so-cool-with-it Coleridge. But you can see the obvious influence. But which one, if any, is true?

South Tower

One Saturday lunchtime last October I went to the Suffolk Arts Club. Because that’s what I’m like. Because that’s what I do.

There was an art event going on in the tower, right up at the top in a little wooden cell you have to climb up into, literally, swinging on wooden hand-holds if you didn’t want to fall to what would very likely be your death on the concrete floor twenty feet below. Someone asked me if I was going to go and contribute something and I got it in my head that art meant painting and painting meant poster paints and probably because it was at the seaside I thought of blue paint, the childhood deep blue of the sea, the blue of the sky back then.

It was October though and the wind was gusting and the sky was grey. I was half-way coming out of a massively upsetting time of my life and trying to learn not to force my pre-conceptions onto events and people. When I swung up into the wooden tower there were no paints. But there was a notebook on a small table underneath the window. So I wrote this.

South Tower, Aldeburgh

I was to put my hand here.

The fingers, knuckles and nails

Coloured blue, poster paint

Flaking from my skin,

Sloughed off. Instead

I listen to the wind,

The sound inside my mind

And try to listen to my heart.

Blue hands. Grey sky.

No poster paints outside my expectations.

Carl Bennett 2013