A bit like the end of term round-up, this post. If I was marking up 2013 though, I’d have to have a word with its parents and note ‘must try harder’ on its report.
What did I do this year? Some of the things I set out to do. Got rid of my house. Re-homed most of the chickens. Won the BBC Writers Room competition. Did I mention that? Oh. Ok. Well, actually, I won the BBC Writers Room competition.
With a screenplay based on my book, Not Your Heart Away, which I also finished and published this past year.
Wrote some poems. Got a radio show. Wrote No Batteries Required, about a bankrupt chicken farmer who decides to kidnap a celebrity chef the same day the Prime Minister he was at school with goes to offer him a job as Minister of Food.
Anything else? Quite a lot. Tried to help. Lost my heart. Found it again. Put it in trust for someone who might appreciate it. Tried to stop acting like an arse quite as much as I managed to do for several months this year. Vowed to listen more and decide less. Walked a lot. I liked that. Took some decent photos. Got a new house to live in, that I think is nicer than the one I moved out of. Saw some old friends, made some old friends (no, not like that), caught up with some old friends and realised how fantastically valuable they are when you need them.
Tried to write School Lane, a story that started in Not Your Heart Away, a story about an old man who had been a young boy when he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, like almost every other small boy in Germany. And I couldn’t do it. Maybe I can next year. It became too complex, too involved, too much about Janni Schenck, the boy whose teacher beat him and his classmates up to stop them being killed by the American patrol coming to their village. Janni’s story expanded to include the Edelweiss Pirates, which meant I had to get him from Hamburg where they hung out to a small village in the mountains, where the real story, the one I heard from an old man in a pub long ago now was set, which was a story in itself.
And alarmingly, bought an electro-acoustic ukelele to do an open-mic 1940s crooner set comprising Fools Rush In, The Nearness of You and either Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens or How Much Do I Love You. Maybe. Or April Played The Fiddle. That bit might need some work. Like learning the ukelele for a start. And it’s sung impossibly high for me. I could do it fine when I was fourteen. Can’t do it now.
So this year coming, 2014 is a new start. New house. A new heart and some new friends. See you there.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
I always thought I should write books. Recently two people whose opinions I respect said no, you’re much better not doing that. Someone else wants me to write lyrics. I always thought I should play the guitar too. Tonight, after not the best few days I’ve ever had, I picked up my old saxophone. And no, that’s not me being rock n roll. It was made in 1924, even older than me. A bit.
I haven’t played the saxophone for months. It must be at least three months. I got it years ago, a really nice Christmas present and stopped playing it when I had four top crowns done. They grind your teeth off down to the gum and put bionic titanium ones on top of them. Now I can bite through steel hawsers. Obviously, I’m down to about ten of those a day. Just socially, you know. I could give it up any time I wanted, but I like the taste.
So the odd thing was that not having played the sax for a while, once the reed was behaving itself it was fine. The reed is literally that, a thin strip of er, reed. You clamp it to the mouthpiece and blow through it. The whole sound depends on the reed vibrating and that depends on how hard you blow and how wet the reed is. They misbehave. They wear out. If they’re too dry they don’t make the right sound and if they get too wet they don’t either.
But when they do, when they do you just know it. You can feel it. And it felt good.
A bit of Eagles (New Kid In Town and yes, you can on a tenor sax), a rip through Dexy’s Burn It Down I really enjoyed playing. I didn’t play Kate Bush’s Saxophone Song, nor Steely Dan’s Deacon Blue. But I did play a bit of Ronnie Lane. When I was about nineteen I went up to Sheffield to see a friend of mine at university there. You know her. Fictionally, she became Liz in Not Your Heart Away. Before I had to run for the train we found Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance album. Maybe that year, maybe the year before, she tracked him down on his farm where his touring outfit, The Passing Show was based, as much as a passing show is based anywhere. I still have that record. The album folded open to show a picture of the band. Try that with a CD. You can see it at the top here.
I make mistakes. I’ve been wrong about lots of things; what to say, what to do. But there are some things I seem to do quite well and it makes me pause when I find they maybe aren’t the things I think I should do. My sax playing needs some work. But it plays better than the guitar. John Coltrane still doesn’t have anything to worry about, and nor does the guy playing sax for Ronnie. The guys in the picture don’t look rich and they weren’t. But they look as if they’ve found what they want to do and they’re doing it, as best they can. I want to get that feeling back. I always wanted to be in that picture. I would have given anything back then to have been in that band. But Ronnie died of Multiple Sclerosis in 1997. And besides, the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
Long long ago when the world was young and me, well, I was younger too a band called Steely Dan used to play a song called Pretzel Logic in the days when bands apart from The Archies had to usually write their own songs, then play them on instruments they had to learn and then sing them themselves. I know!!! How fake is that!?!?! It’ll never catch on.
Well it did, because there wasn’t any other way of doing it. People like Frank Sinatra never sang a darned thing they’d ever written because that’s not what they did and so far as I can guess, Elvis and Suzi Quatro didn’t either. Suzi Quattro. I mean, what? As someone who is a little over 21, each time I see this I can’t believe I saw this. It wasn’t just the obvious bra-less ness, (like OMG) or even the leather jumpsuit, or the huge hairy blokes she surrounded herself with (and apparently it was the drummer, I seem to remember, if I got that right). It wasn’t just the fact that back in ’73 this stuff went out on air live at 7:30 on a Thursday on Top of the Pops.
Suzi Quatro was considered a healthy influence on fourteen year-old boys, back then. It explains quite a lot, doesn’t it?
That’s right morality crusaders. Ever wondered why youth street crime went up? Back in the day you could leave your back door unlocked, if you’ll pardon the expression, because every malenky nadsat droog was safe at home trying to memorise every stitch in the seams in the lingering crotch shots the BBC thought appropriate before the watershed. And there were quite a few.
Were they strange times? I don’t know. Like any time, we all thought it was normal, even when we heard stuff like Sparks singing some of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t just the bloke who played the keyboards and looked a bit like Hitler, or his androgynous brother (how weird was that, man? as we said back then). It was the whole, you know. Thing. We were fourteen or something. Why did we have to deal with stuff like this? I mean, it wasn’t 1918, except for the Souix.
But then, why did we buy it? Because we did. We all bought hugely into the whole sad song laments of Americans dragging thirty (how old? Nobody’s THAT old, man) not least because back before the whole interwebby thing and Wikipedia it wasn’t easy to find out that Ian Hunter was born in 1939.
I’m sorry, I still need to pause to let the horror of that statement go away a bit. “I got out my six string razor and hit the sky.” As we said back then, what does that even mean? Did we ever listen to the words when we heard bands like Eagles, singing coked-out dead-end laments like Desperado and Hotel California? How did that resonate with someone less than half their age, living 5,000 miles away on an estate in Trowbridge? Because it did.
Probably it meant just the same as it means now. The words change but the feeling doesn’t. Someone said to me yesterday, “you’re good with words when you speak. But when you write it down it’s shit. Sorry.” And sometimes, she’s right. I can’t catch that feeling, the way the music made us feel, the way it probably makes younger people feel now. Same things, different words. The same feeling, just a different way of saying it. I thought that as we sat on our bar stools as the music played. This hasn’t changed in three decades, for either of us.
For me, it was always Deacon Blues. Back before I had to do something about un-becoming the expanding man in the opening line (yes I did, yes you can, buy the programme…) Steely Dan’s song did it for me. It got in my head. It became my anthem. I don’t drink scotch whisky all night long. Not for years. I don’t drink drive. But I sometimes think the real thing I should do is learn to work the saxophone and play just what I feel. I’ve been called many names when I’ve lost, usually short ones but they still don’t call me Deacon Blue. There are days, more often nights, when I wish they did. Somewhere in that parallel universe, sometimes, just sometimes when the nights are getting longer and the apple wood smoke is heavy on the ground, when the winter starts to feel its way through your clothes, somewhere they still do.
And pretzel logic? Oh, you know how that works. Or maybe you don’t, if you’re lucky. It’s late and the words make perfect sense at the time and they curl back on themselves and make their own sense, in a big circle, like one of those who was that Dutch guy who did the drawings of lizards running upstairs in a circle. You want another? You drive here? You know how that thinking works and where it’s going, at least until you sober up.
So as The Archies used to say, pour a little sugar on it, baby. Just pour a little sugar on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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.
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.
A bit like the end of term round-up, this post. If I was marking up 2013 though, I’d have to have a word with its parents and note ‘must try harder’ on its report.
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 
