Uncategorized – Page 17 – Writer-insighter

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.

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.

Through a glass

Walking past an optician’s the other day (at least it looked like an optician’s shop) I saw one of those things that makes at least me go hmmm. Not in a good way.

Heston Blumenthal spectacles.

Poisoner. — Someone with memory challenges, if it’s about oysters.

If there’s any need at all to continue then I just will.

Nigella and Jamie Oliver cookware was bad enough. I could just about tolerate Jamie Oliver cookware because after all he was actually a trained chef who’d put the hours in and like Anthony Worral Thomson might be presumed to know what’s rubbish in a busy kitchen, rather than choosing something because the colour matched his nail varnish.

Gok Wan spectacles were stretching it, for me, not just because I detest the simpering silly fey queen act he has to put on for the camera on the orders of his director (Gok Wan says he’s a pint and a game of footie bloke who happens to be gay, so don’t blame me) but because I can’t see what a stylist has to do with spectacles.

Or actually, thinking about it and so long as he doesn’t get involved with the prescriptions and puffing air into your eyes while you look at a balloon, I can. I mean, presumably his job used to involve trawling through catalogues and buying hundreds of frames on sale-or-return before a gruelling morning with clients trying to find the has-to-be-that-one-

John Denver aviator frames never really caught on.

darling frame that would make someone look like they liked wearing glasses when nobody really does in case they look like the kid in the NHS specs on the special desk in Mrs Jones classroom, before John Boy Walton, John Denver and John Lennon made round lenses temporarily acceptable. And why the spooky unexplained mystery internet conspiracy Illuminati coincidence of them all being called John?

Ok. So Gok Wan. Nigella. No, sorry, I can’t stand Nigella. I’ve never liked cartoons apart from Tom and Jerry.

Much less of a ludicrous pastiche than Nigella. — Less of a ludicrous pastiche than Nigella.

But Heston Blumenthal is a cook. I’m not going to call him a chef in the same way I don’t call Nigella a chef. Because they both aren’t. Chefs are trained. Neither of those two ever did a day’s training. Epitomising the great Neo-Con Lie, Blumenthal says he taught himself, so he can take all the credit when it goes right, presumably.

Obviously it’s not his fault when it goes wrong. For example, when he poisoned over a hundred people who came to regret going to the Fat Duck at Bray, although interior decorators probably did very nicely out of that particular epidemic of food poisoning that the local Environmental Health Inspectors felt was just one of those things, in a way they signally never do if you have a restaurant and not a TV show as well. Try being called (Your Name Goes Here)’s Kitchen or the Balti Star and see how long you’re open if you give ten people food poisoning, let alone 240 customers spinning like toxic Catherine Wheels, but the kind nobody is going to say ‘oooooh’ about. Although a hose might still come in handy.

A cook. Heston Blumenthal is a cook. He shaves his head, presumably because he’s going bald or maybe he just read Skinhead under his desk in RE too often. He wears chefs whites, presumably he pops into the kitchen now and then. Big watches, because hey, it’s a guy thing. I’ve got one. I can’t quite see (ahahaha, geddit?) how that qualifies him to design spectacles.

Ok, he wears them. They make him look like a Thunderbirds puppet. I wear glasses too. I’m actually doing it now. Reckon we’ll see the Writer-Insighter range at Boots any time soon?

Harrow.

As Benny Hill used to say. A big welcome to the one in five visitors to this website who are in China.

What is it you actually want?

I know it’s rubbery, but what can there possibly be here you’d be interested in?

Tell me and I’ll send you a copy of Not Your Heart Away, free.

Now that’s rubbery.

More Batteries Required

Some of my more long-suffering friends will be familiar with No Batteries Required. It started off as a joke in a pub.

Wouldn’t it be funny if a bankrupt chicken farmer kidnapped a celebrity chef? No, tell you what, it would be funnier if the chef had gone to school with the Prime Minister and he got kidnapped as well. And he could be at the farm to

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

give his old school chum a government job.

So it got wrote, got recorded, go edited and I sent the script off to Eastern Angles. I’d seen one of their productions done on Bentwaters airbase, near my house and I liked the play and the way they fixed on local stories and used local resources to tell them. The play was about an airman, one of the Americans who used to fly out of Bentwaters until it shut 20 years ago, and in parallel it was about the people who used to live here, in the next village over the other side of the base.

It got finished in May last year. We recorded it just before Christmas. I sent the script to Eastern Angles in January. I edited the recording in March.

I didn’t hear any more until this Thursday. Then I got an email.

I like the dialogue and the sheer bravura of the piece.

What does that even mean?

There are some words and phrases I’ve never bothered to find out exactly what they mean until very recently. Obviously it rarely stopped me from using them. Cartesian dualism, for example. Quantitative easing, which must never be

Ladeezangennelmen, swingin' this town tonight, it's Al Dente! Let's have a big hand! — Ladeezangennelmen, swingin’ this town tonight, it’s Al Dente!

confused with the kind of thing the Weimar Republic did, just creating money out of nowhere. Bravura was another one of those words. Like al dente, who I’d always presumed had a dance band in Philadelphia.

So apparently, according to an online dictionary because I’ve been too busy to get out of bed doing this re-write all day (well no, obviously I got out of bed to go to the bathroom and make some kedgeree and end up with faux chainsmoker Writers Fingers but in fact it’s just where I cleared up some spilt turmeric without a cloth, oh and to get some wine, obviously) bravura means some really nice things according to the Oxford dictionary.

Great technical skill and brilliance shown in a performance or activity.

A display of great daring, except that wouldn’t wholly make sense in context.

Which was nice, as the saying goes, because that was an email from Eastern Angles, asking for a look at a proper stage version of the play that came in on Thursday. Needless to say I’d said there was a proper stage version ready. Needless to say, there wasn’t. So I had to get my finger out this weekend. Even if it was a curious shade of yellow.

Wish me luck.

Avoiding Stress

It’s been a bit of a week.

It kicked off with someone at my door demanding I don’t do any more stand-up poetry for several reasons:

1) It’s drivel.

2) Nobody likes it.

3) It’s upsetting people and they won’t come to the gigs.

4) It’s obvious who it’s about.

5) It’s stressing that person out.

5) Nobody likes it.

This was all a bit problematic because firstly, of course it’s drivel. I keep saying so.

I DO NOT DO POETRY.

As poetry, my stuff is utter drivel. I agree, like totes.

I don’t know what poetry really is. What I mean is people like Coleridge do poetry. My stuff isn’t like his. But nobody’s ever could be like his. He wasn’t just off his face a lot of the time but he lived in the place I come from and all of the best people I used to know combined those two things too.

After last night’s gig somebody asked me who my influences were, then asked if I minded saying. I can’t think of any possible reason I wouldn’t. I don’t think I’m very much like Adrian Henry, Hugo Williams and John Betjeman. I wish I was, except two of them are dead and the other one isn’t looking very well. But they were the people who I’d like to be like, in writing terms.

Adrian Henry was one of the Liverpool poets. I saw him perform in Bath once and won’t again as he’s dead now. I wish I could write things as good as this:

Love Is

Love is the presents in Christmas shops

Love is when you’re feeling Top of the Pops

Love is what happens when the music stops

Love is.

Drivel, isn’t it? But I like the musing, thinking aloud quality of the repetition. I like the triviality and familiarity of the references to things like Top Of The Pops. I like the banality and the silliness, because sometimes that’s how you feel when you’re in love. Is that poem ‘about’ a specific person? Maybe. Maybe not. We can all recognise the feeling though, without that doing any harm to anybody at all.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn

Summoned By Bells was the first book I bought with my first wages when I went to London. It was ‘about’ a secretly adulterous portly man in a pork pie hat maundering around railway stations and churches, poking around his furniture-making parents’ courtship half a century before. What’s not to like?

At work I sat next to a man who’d been one of the managers of the band Killing Joke. Anyone who thought the band were fascists obviously never swapped sandwiches with Danny. Nice bloke though he was he totally didn’t get Betjeman, couldn’t stand the dum de dum de dum de dee of the rhyming, notwithstanding that Betjeman himself said he was no rhymer, no Milton. But then and now I can’t understand anyone who doesn’t go a bit quiet and reflective with a silly smile half on their lips as they read:

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,

The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,

As I struggle with double-end evening tie,

For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts

And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports

And westering, questioning settles the sun

On your low leaded-window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Bath-path, tie-I, shorts-sports; chase the rhyme John, why don’t you? But at the same time I was arguably lucky enough to grow up in a house like that. I knew girls like that. I never wore a bow-tie for a date, but I did have to learn how to tie one later on. (Tip: tie it around a bannister or a bedpost, then undo it on the adjuster, then put it round your neck. No, don’t thank me, honestly. Yes, I did say have to). And when I read that I can still feel the sunburn on my forearms as I put on a crisp shirt for the evening and wonder how she’s going to be. This evening. Do you think she’ll, you know? if we can find somewhere? There’s a surprising amount of that in Betjeman’s stuff. Joan Hunter Dunn was a real girl who Betjeman had a crush on, (with whom, hem hem) but they were never engaged and they only once went out for lunch. I’m pretty darned sure they never fooled around on a car seat instead of going into the dance they were supposed to be going to. Was the poem ‘about’ the woman whose name he slapped all over it? Well, yes and no. They weren’t engaged. They didn’t go to a dance. And not on a car seat or anywhere else. But she played sports quite a lot and her parents had a house like that.

Unobtainable

I discovered Hugo Williams in a library in Bath but not in the way that Peter Wyngard discovered a police officer in a public lavatory there. When I was supposed to be revising I read No Particular Place To Go over and again (yes I know that’s a phrase I use over and again. It means over and again, you see). That book included the poem about Miss O’Sullivan’s Record Exchange, which is fabulous and was real, (we used to jive in the listening booths when she turned the music up, knowing we wouldn’t buy. It was the best she could do. You couldn’t hear that kind of thing any other way in 1956). But Hugo Williams also writes stuff like this:

Whether it was putting in an extra beat,
or leaving one out, I couldn’t tell.
My heart seemed to have forgotten
everything it ever knew
about timing and co-ordination
in its efforts to get through to someone
on the other side of a wall.
As I lay in bed, I could hear it
hammering away inside my pillow,
being answered now and then
by a distant guitar-note of bedsprings,
pausing for a moment, as if listening,
Then hurrying on as before.

I wonder if Hugo Williams has people knocking on his door saying ‘I know who this is about.’ It’s obviously a very personal poem. Is it about lying in bed listening to the sound of someone you really like shagging someone else in the next room? Maybe. I think so. Some people’s lives are settled and without things like that happening. Mine – well, I’ve known what Hugo Williams was talking about, if he was, even if it was a really long time ago and before I adjusted my attitudes somewhat. Compartmentalising, I think it’s called. Probably. But it could just be about not being able to get to sleep.

He also wrote stuff like this:

I don’t know what to do

As you pass your time

Perfecting the darkness between us.

That was about someone flicking her hair over her eyes looking for split ends instead of looking at him. There has never been a period in history where that’s been a good sign. So I wonder if he ever got email as I did this week, asking him why his stuff is full of self-pity and that wasn’t like him and did he have a split personality or something?

Moving on, as I think we probably should, nothing I write is ‘about’ anyone. Things happen, those things provoke ideas, sometimes the ideas become stuff I write down, sometimes it works as a performance piece and sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s not a documentary.

Like Williams, like Betjeman, like Coleridge, like Henry, which is nowhere near saying my stuff is as good as theirs, the things I write about happen to everybody. It’s not a written record. It isn’t supposed to upset anyone. I hope it doesn’t. It isn’t meant to.

It certainly is time I broadened my scope and varied the themes in the things I write. It’s probably overdue and last week’s visit was a good, if unwelcome, wake-up call to get my finger out and write about some different things. So this week I have. (What Does It Feel Like, Mick? and Nazi Jazz Rules) It’s actually better stuff.

Some people like my stuff. A surprising number, to me, anyway. Not everybody will and that goes for anything, whether it’s pub poetry, as Naomi Jaffa at The Poetry Trust smilingly but somewhat sniffily called it last week, (as in “I don’t do pub poetry, Carl”), politics or pizza. Actually, that’s rubbish. Everyone likes pizza.

To be clear, I absolutely do not want to stress anybody out. If people don’t like my stuff I can live with that. If they don’t want to see me then I’m certainly not going to keep trying to see them.

People get over-excited. But the next time someone comes to my door telling me where I’m allowed to go and what I’m allowed to say then the stress levels involved in finding a police car in your drive and uniformed officers in your living room talking about counselling, procuring, aiding and abetting harassment are quite high, I’m told.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some new stuff to write for a gig for Mother’s Day that people clearly do like, or at least enough to pay me to do it. But with that topic and my family, that’s going to be a bit of a challenge.

Sympathy for the devil

Not Fade Away

Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, a woman he’d been in a relationship with for over a decade, was found hanged on 17th March 2014. The newspaper and media coverage is more inane than usual, maybe because this was a real, non-political tragedy.

It could have been an accident, although it’s hard to see how. The police have ruled out foul play. Nobody else was involved. A terrible, hideous thing happened for reasons that will never be known now, something that will affect the survivors, the other people who knew this poor woman for the rest of their lives.

I trained as a journalist. Friends worked at the BBC. I tried to imagine a newsroom that night, post-Leveson, when a media that had promised to behave itself did what it always does now, looking for a story.

Perhaps I should point out that this is fiction. But I don’t think it’s that far off what can happen.

So What Does It Feel Like, Mick?

So what does it feel like, Mick?

But apart from that Mrs Lincoln,

How did you enjoy the play?

Speak into the microphone, love

Or they won’t hear what you have to say.

Deep breath. Brave smile. Shoulders back, love.

Show ‘em what you got. Nothing to be ashamed of.

Our man in New York, our fearless reporter

Some dork who wasn’t even born the last time

His paper made up comments from a neighbour,

A spokesman, a concerned individual, our source,

An insider at the Palace who cannot be named

For legal reasons before they made their excuses and left

Is spending a good half hour on Google tonight

Digging up dirt on the Street Fighting Man.

Ex-Model Dies Alone in Drugs Hell?

Pity we can’t run it. She hanged herself? No kiss and tell?

Are we sure he didn’t do it? You reckon it’s suicide?

Don’t give me that. What’s he got to hide?

You know, like with Marianne Faithful except

She’s inconveniently alive, even if she is living in Eire.

See if you can pull anything out of Library about her instead.

Rock star swimming pool party tip-off orgy,

Fur coat no underwear and popular confectionery.

Are you kidding me?

That’s what you get from a Journalism MA?

Is that what I pay you for? What did you say?

See son, all that Marianne Faithful stuff

Was back in 1963 or thereabouts. I can’t use it.

That’s no earthly use to me.

And we can’t keep our readers in the dark.

Didn’t she live near Central Park?

Isn’t that where John Lennon got shot?

Haven’t we got any pictures of her and her mates looking hot?

We’ve got no slashing knives, no mystery prowler,

Are you sure there aren’t any pictures of her growing older

Disgracefully? Or looking down her top getting out of a taxi?

Was this some sex thing that all went wrong?

Get me a list of all the Stones songs.

How are you feeling now Mr Jagger?

I don’t want to intrude on your grief

Or nag or anything but our readers have a right to know:

On a scale of one to ten how do you feel? Exactly how low?

Are you sick as a parrot? Or totally gutted?

Are you feeling as if your insides are knotted with grief?

Just tell me then we’ll go away.

‘Cos if you don’t we’ll stay here all day.

Get me a coffee love. And make it strong.

Motivate me to carry on churning this out

For the world to read.

I’m just the editor; it’s not about me.

I reckon it looks like suicide

But we’ll wait for the inquest to say how she died.

If we start it up he’ll close us down.

He’s got enough dosh for the best lawyers in town.

We’ll have all his fanbase jumping up and down

And the advertisers do not like it up ‘em, Mr Mainwearing.

You know the freedom of the Press is sacrosanct to me.

You call that coffee love? I asked for tea.

Nearly fifty, wasn’t she?

Right. Headline: What A Drag It Is Getting Old.

49th Nervous Breakdown. Shattered.

This May Be The Last Time.

I Don’t Know Says Mick. Or just Oh No.

Get on it. We need this by six.

What are we going to say? Run it by Legal anyway

Jagger’s got enough money to stitch us up

Like a kipper if he feels like it.

What have we got? Come on. Give me ideas.

“Mick Jagger is struggling to understand

The death of his girlfriend.”

Ok, Pamela Stephenson can write something

About typical man coming to terms with grief.

“We spent many wonderful years together

And had made a great life for ourselves.

The Rolling Stones have cancelled

The first date of their tour.”

Is that all we’ve got? Isn’t there any more?

“I have been touched by the tributes paid. And also

The personal messages of support I have received.

I will never forget her.”

You see what he’s doing, giving us crap copy

We could have done ourselves?

What a git. It’s like we’ve never even met her.

Which we haven’t, but our music industry insider

Hasn’t come up with anything either. Thank-you Simon.

She was the worst kind of person so far as we can tell:

Honest, clean, nice and in a relationship

With someone famous. Sod that.

What the hell do you think you’re paid for

If you can’t find anything swept behind the door?

If we can’t call her some kind of name Legal will approve?

And then we can all go home and ignore the fact

That a real person we’ve got no dirt on died

And in a luxury hotel tonight with an untouched drink

At his side a man who everyone thinks they know

Locked the door and switched the phone off,

Got undressed, showered, did his teeth,

Poured another massive Scotch and didn’t even sip,

Took out another cigarette and couldn’t get it lit,

But lay down on his bed,

This man without a bride,

Switched off the light

Alone for once

And cried.

So what does it feel like, Mick?

No Batteries Required

No chickens were harmed in the making of this production.

It used to make sense to describe voice plays – plays using voices and not actions – as radio plays. But like my Lifeboat Party radio show ( oh, do you? Brilliant! Would you like a drink?) a lot of radio isn’t on the er, radio, these days. If you see what I mean.

I can’t call this a radio play, sensibly. Which leaves me uncertain what to call it. A play for voices sounds really pretentious, as if I had a pipe to go with my roll-neck sweater. And a beige one at that. Obviously that would be the pretentious version of me; mine’s black. Well, ok, two of them are black and one’s a very dark blue, the difference being mine are practical and cool, like me.

Anyway, the play what I wrote. It’s mostly based on fact. Battery cages for laying hens are now illegal in the UK. You can still stick 25,000 chickens in a barn, cut a hole in the door so they could get out if they could get to the door and weren’t already traumatised and call them free-range or barn but that’s not the point of the story. If there is any point to this comedy it’s simply this plain moral: if you say ‘I could write a play..’ on your third drink then you may well have to.

So I did. The voices were recorded just before Christmas in a session that was going brilliantly until I got a phone call that made me feel sick. New significant other (and it turned out, rather temporary sig. oth. Very significant. Very definitely other, now) demanding to know why all my stuff was all over her kitchen and what was I going to do about it. In a line that screams out to be used in one of my poems (Discuss. Starting with whether they are or not) she delivered the killer blow:

‘I’m so annoyed that I’m not going to say what I want you to do about it. I’m so annoyed that I can’t actually speak about it. So I’m going to end this phone call now.”

I thought I was good at passive aggression.

Actually, that really does deserve its own poem, doesn’t it? But first, enjoy No Batteries Required. It’s just over the half hour.

You can listen to No Batteries Required by doing that thing dolphins do, just here:

No Batteries Required – a play for voices.

Late Train Out of Paddington

I grew up a long way from here, not just in terms of years but in distance. Over two hundred miles, a long way in England, anyway. It seems so. I lived in a small town of about 20,000 people but I never felt I knew everybody; I never have. Life started to change when I was about 18. There had been changes before that, but these were changes I was excited about, leaving home. Discovering things. Differences. The idea that not everywhere was like the little town I lived in. That other people had other ideas and some of them had ideas like me. Maybe it was the times, maybe it was just how old I was, but I felt change coming, an idea that things were going to change in a progressively better way. I don’t know people who think that way now.

At the same time as this idea of some non-specific progress I was becoming more aware of the past, from the grass mound at Avebury I’d drive past on the A4 going up to London to the fantastic vision of Brunel’s Paddington station, giving the ultimate lie to the gimcrackery of steampunk. Some of the trains I got back home were ancient, especially on the Sunday service to Westbury, but all of them had a certain feel about them, that they were taking me somewhere special. Not to Trowbridge where I lived, not to Westbury where the fast train junction was. But to the future, by way of the past. I wrote this a couple of years ago, mostly. But it speaks with the same voice I think I had back then.

Late Train Out of Paddington

Brunel's vision of the West, starting at Paddington. — Brunel’s vision of the West, starting at Paddington.

When I’d been to an interview for university

One year or another a long time ago,

I’d stay with my step-sister in Notting Hill.

She was ten years older than me

Doing Law after her PhD and going back

I’d get a late train out of Paddington.

I’d come up on the Thursday and wait for them to get home.

They had a light for burglars that came on by itself

So I could never tell if they were at home or not.

Often I hoped they were out so I could drink

In the Sun In Splendour, me with a book,

An actor from a TV cop show with his book too.

One night a woman came in asking about her friend

Who’d killed himself; No-one said they knew

Who she was talking about until she’d gone.

I’d smoked strong cigarettes and gone to a Russian bistro

Or we’d go to Geales’s for fish just around the corner,

Like everything else worth doing in London then.

I put my brass Zippo lighter on top of my cigarettes on the table.

I’d eaten broccoli quiche and good bread and butter

Cut with a razorlike old knife on thin antique plates.

I’d done my interview on Friday at UCL or Brighton or City

Or somewhere. I didn’t really care;

District Line tube at Paddington. Everything started and ended here.

But I wanted to be in Notting Hill back then.

I didn’t buy any henna for my hair in Portobello.

I didn’t buy a yak hair coat or a broken Anglepoise lamp

I could fix or 1940s French cordorouy trousers with braces off the stalls

But I saw a woman naked when I walked past her bedroom door.

Ten years older than me, an actress in a film

I hadn’t seen. My bare feet silent on the wooden floor.

I couldn’t mention it then. I still can’t now.

I’d drunk red wine and wondered how I was going to live here,

Before the Tube to Paddington, haunted with the ghosts of steam trains

Under Brunel’s airy iron roof, my train on the platform past the sign

Advertising Harlech Television, “Your Station Back Home.”

Sometimes the carriages were so old they had

Wooden windows pulled up by a leather strap.

After I’d found my seat and stowed my bag

And found out where the loo was

I opened my New Musical Express,

Or Sounds, spreading it out on the table

So people could see but really

I watched the white of the tall old houses

Backing on to the tracks.

I remember the hum of the big train flexing,

Then coasting over the points, gathering itself

While it tugged at the skirts of Georgian London,

Then the big quiet push of the diesel when it

Got the scent of open country,

Settling me into my seat

With a bottle of Special Brew from the buffet car.

Actually, better make that two.

Rain slashed the trees as the sun set around Reading;

I got glimpses of strangers’s lives and tried to remember

The two abandoned farmhouses near the tracks.

You and I could have lived in either of them

If I’d ever known where they were.

First I needed to do university, then when I had a job

Whatever it was, when I got paid and when

I’d learned how to fix-up houses,

When there was a different you

And the you I knew then had become someone else

And you were just an infrequent memory;

When I knew you would be. And anyway

Nothing really happened to go that way.

I can still see out of the window and hear the boom

Of the engine as it winds out towards Swindon.

I can see the naked white backs of Georgian houses

From the tracks that carry the late train out of Paddington

But I can’t seem to find my seat anymore.

(C) Carl Bennett 2014

It’s not mine

I wish it was. It’s just rather beautiful, when you’ve got through what relationship advisors call the stupid cow/what a bastard stage depending on gender, when you can think without whatever it is making the wrong connections in your brain and making you not you at all, everyone forgets that Icarus also flew; that there were two of you in this, whatever it was. And if it went wrong for you it went wrong for them as well. And that neither of you meant it to.

It’s Spring soon

Things end. But things begin as well, all of the time. Every day. So deep breath. Head up. Shoulders back. No name-calling. And smile. As Nat King Cole used to say.

Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.