Like A River Through My Dreams

“They feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don’t like it. I think their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating.”

Robert Persig; Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintainance, 1974.

Last week I bought the book I’ve bought and given on twice before. Third time lucky maybe. Someone whose opinion I respected when I was 17 told me I wasn’t interested in Persig’s philosophy or his Chautauqua, his thoughts on mechanisation, alienation nor anomy, nor anything expect the motorcycle part of the title, and there’s not a whole lot of that in the book. He was wrong. I was fascinated, as Persig was, as Brautigan was, by the idea of an America that was just out of reach in the past, where people wandered to heal themselves in a huge, empty land of big skies.

I even won a competition writing about it when I was 14, or at least, writing about the movie version of it, shamelessly stealing everything I could from Kerouac and the movie Hudd. I might as well have written about England using Crossroads and Jerome K Jerome as a template. 

This road is closed.

OK, nobody can see the future, let alone say how things are going to be half a century in the future, which it’s still quite a shock to have to write, given I was alive and reading when Zen And was written. The most individualist individualist goes online to say how much he hates technology these days, or none of the other individuals get to hear about him at all. And then what would the point of social media be? I’m not sure if anyone even bothers with the notion of hating technology, or not being part of a mass movement, or wondering what it means to be an individual and how you combine that with being a part of society, which whether they like it or not, everyone is, anymore.

But I’ve never understood people who don’t take at least an interest in how their vehicle works. It dates back to when I first had motorcycles and couldn’t afford for anyone else to repair or maintain them. If it was going to get done then I had to be the one who did it. There wasn’t a choice. It dates back to a conversation I had with a kid my age whose Daddy had bought him a brand new motorcycle to go with the brand new Fonz-style leather jacket that would have given about as much protection as a box of Kleenex. I’d read something about steering geometry in Bike magazine, which back then was my substitute for the Bible. And he totally couldn’t understand the concept that a longer wheelbase is going to be more stable than a short one, better on long, sweeping curves than short radius rapid changes of direction. He genuinely thought that ‘so the bike knows what kind of corner it is?’ was a snappy come-back that totally proved his point. It seemed to be that dirt bikes are dirt bikes, grand prix bikes are grand prix bikes, and apparently, some factor in their names made the difference. Apparently, I was the one who’d got it all wrong. 

He desperately wanted my Triumph T25 because it looked cool, so I sold it to him. It sprang an oil leak from a loose cover on the top right-hand side of the engine. Instead of fixing it with a cardboard gasket using a biro and a Stanley knife, the way I did in fifteen minutes in the stockroom of the supermarket where we both had Saturday jobs, he scampered all the way to his Daddy to get help to get his money back before he went to the London School of Economics. I neither know nor care what happened to him after that. He would have kept his hands clean, whatever he did. Someone else I knew worked for IBM. He couldn’t understand how I could say a steam locomotive we walked past came from Eastern Europe just by the shape of it. I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t.

The past is another country. They do things differently there.

Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where they still did what they’d done to Robert Persig in a different hospital in America but the effect was the same. Electro-convulsive therapy means jolting massive voltages into someone’s brain. Predictably enough, it obliterates memory. Quite a lot of the time it’s remarkably effective at wiping-out memories of traumatic events, the kind that can ruin the rest of someone’s life. As the NHS explain, it isn’t used as often to cure severe mental illness now, because there are more drug treatments available. I remember seeing someone who’d had a drug treatment one lunchtime. When I got back from my walk an hour later he was still in exactly the same place as when I first saw him, drugged into total immobility, way overweight because he hardly moved anywhere these days, entirely consistent with what we knew about every drug-therapy inmate – they’re going to die about 15 years before people outside the hospital, because although we can stop them killing themselves or somebody else by making them immobile, we can’t translate that into making them want to live.

On one level, Zen And is about Persig’s rider character discovering and rediscovering that the Phaedrus character is him pre-ECT. It can wipe out memories of things you might reasonably want to remember. Your partner’s name, for example, or where you went to school. Stuff it might be useful to keep in mind. Such as social progess, or reproductive rights, or the ability to live and work in another country without having to pass tests and prove a level of income. Or the fact that if you have even a basic awareness of the vehicle you travel in, you can save yourself a lot of money if you can recognise when things start to go wrong, even if it’s just a feeling you can’t quite articulate. 

On a motorcycle, I call that a day you shouldn’t ride anywhere. It’s a time to stop, sit down and think about what you know and what that tells you about things you don’t know. It could be a new sound you’ve never heard before or just a difference in the feeling of the ride that tells you the brakes or the suspension isn’t all it ought to be. 

I didn’t know about ECT back when I read the book. I didn’t know about America and I think I know less about it now the election of a lifetime is being decided. I drove across those flyover states Persig rode decades ago, doing my very best to be the hero of my own road movie. And pretty much succeeding, for what that was worth. It was a theme that stayed with me way too long, thanks to the movies.

I loved the idea of chautauqua. I thought maybe I’d be involved in that one day, somewhere, and in the spoken word stuff I used to do maybe I was. I loved the theme of working things out for yourself, which for me is what motorcycles or boats are all about, that idea that you can do it just as well as a paid mechanic, the way John Fowles described poor Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, scrambling to classify the things he found on his walks around Lyme Regis, in exactly the same way and for the same reasons trained scientists did then: nobody had and you’ve got to start somewhere. It made the amateur and the professor equals, for the last time in history. Looking for the link so you can buy the book, dear reader, I found this Quora-type question and answer, which unlike most of Quora, seemed to the point.

What is the point of the French Lieutenant’s Woman?

Fowles is concerned in this novel with the effects of society on the individual’s awareness of himself or herself and how that awareness dominates and distorts his or her entire life, including relationships with other people.

The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams

I didn’t write that. It was a book about being what used to be called a Red Indian, a Native American, First Nation survivor, about twenty years back, when it wasn’t tipis and pow-wows but clapped-out pickup trucks, casinos and foetal alcohol syndrome. I read that book over and over again. I felt the pain, but not as much as when I discovered that the writer was about as much Red Indian as I am. Which in case you’re wondering, isn’t much at all. This winter morning I’m still reading Zen And The Art for the countlessth time.  And it makes me wonder about this book. As Meatloaf said, it was long ago and it was far away. To which Mr Persig has the ultimate reply.

There’s no traffic on this road, and we’re moving right along. It’s a travelling day.

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The past is another country

Just before Christmas, on the shortest day, I did something I hadn’t done for thirty years and bought myself a motorcycle. The last one was a late 1980s 883cc purple metal flake Harley Sportster (Baby….!), which was low, sounded good and was nice to ride, but as every month went on and another £200 had to be spent to get it the way it should have been, I came to realise that there was more to the H-D experience than I’d imagined. It cost more, too, buying the parts to cure the faults that building down to a cost to sucker the buyers inevitably meant. 

Some of the issues were weird, like how it was geared for 55mph in top, which was the US speed limit, but the speedometer was in miles per hour. Maybe the bike was some grey import as I’d bought it second-hand but with only about 1500 miles. Whether or not the inlet manifold shouldn’t have split. Being told, ‘Yeah, they all do that, mate,’ didn’t help. Why did they? 

‘Metal fatigue, innit’ didn’t reassure. 

Any metal failing on a fifteen-hundred-mile motorcycle ought never to have been on there in the first place. The dealership got arsey when I said that and came back with, ‘Yeah, we just take your money, don’t we?’ Which, so far as I could see, was true. Telling the guy he’d got a lot of attitude for someone who’d just had £3,500 off me didn’t seem to help, somehow.

Getting back into it.

“““““““““““““““““““““““They fixed it, but that didn’t happen again, and I chugged off over the blue horizon. But first, I had to find some decent brakes, and a four-piston Brembo sorted that out. The vibration was something else, cured by a Bar Snake, not to be confused with a lounge lizard. Essentially, it is a solid, bendy rubber hose. The idea was and probably still is to stuff it inside the handlebars where it’ll vibrate at a different frequency than the bars and cancel the vibes out. Then, you might see what’s in the mirrors at speeds over 25 mph.

The tyres lasted 3,000 miles. The spark plugs didn’t seem to. The battery box didn’t either, because there wasn’t one on there until I found a three-sided chrome box at some non-main dealer place, the rip-off artists near Greenwich, or the surprisingly pleasant Hells Angel shop down in Kent somewhere. I knew which I preferred dealing with, and it wasn’t Fred Warr’s in World’s End, one of the most unfriendly dealers I’ve ever come across. Maybe it was because I didn’t buy it there, maybe … I don’t know what it was. Maybe they were just arses. They acted like it. 

It got stolen and dumped in a field. The bike, not Fred Warr’s entire shop, you understand. We found and recovered it, then I used the insurance money to bore it out to 1200, put a Mikuni injector on it to replace the carburettor, got rid of that biscuit-tin air filter and stuck Kuryakin footpads on it, despite wondering all the while why one of the Men From Uncle was messing around with motorcycle parts. I suppose a lot of people have a side hustle. New coil, new plugs, new leads, and paint the tank jet black, and it was good to go. It did, and I used the money to buy a laptop and a mono laser printer. There wasn’t much change, or not from the money I got for it, anyway.

A strange thing happened a couple of months later, though. A friend’s sister knew the person who’d bought it. She told me it had broken down and wouldn’t start. I talked to the guy on the phone because despite everything else that had happened with the little Sportster, not starting wasn’t one of the things that had happened. He’d tried everything and had no luck.

At about the same time, someone I knew went to see a medium, a descendant of Admiral Dampier, no less, although the two events were unrelated. Out of nowhere, the medium claimed she had a message about the motorcycle her client’s friend had just sold, purportedly from the father of the client. He’d been an army despatch rider in Burma, back in 1945. Tell him it’s the coil.

My friend dutifully relayed the message, and I told her she was talking out of her rear end. When was the last time you heard of a brand new, out-of-the-box coil failing these days?

Except that was what it was.

Nothing even vaguely supernatural has happened with the F650 I bought to get back into bikes, nor the R1150R that replaced that. Nothing remotely spooky has gone on with the Ducati Scrambler I bought a couple of weeks ago, either. Not unless you count the Ducati’s unearthly ability to need its cam belts replacing every five years whether you ride it or leave it in the garage, or the 1150’s habit of growing heavier the longer you don’t ride it. 

I don’t know what to make of spirit messages from beyond the grave diagnosing Harley-Davidson replacement parts. I gave up on H-D a long time ago, anyway. The past is a different country, and besides, the wench’s father is dead.

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More than money

Peace of mind has a price, and the Post Office hasn’t paid it.

Possibly unlike many FT readers it’s fairly unusual for me to find serious amounts of money deposited into my bank account unexpectedly. Let’s just say I’ve bought a house for less. It’s not something I expect to happen often in the future, but after my first wave of total disbelief I thought something else: it wasn’t enough.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s I was a partner in a business information company; market research, if you can separate that in your mind from someone approaching you with a clipboard in the street and asking you about nappies. Because we specialised in researching technical and IT issues, and also because we didn’t know any better at the time and thought it meant we were going places, ICL-Fujitsu became one of our clients. To be fair, we did go places. The epic time-wasting trips to New York and New England were fun, apart from the time I mixed my time-zones up and realised in a bar that I’d been looking at the wrong watch all night and now had precisely forty minutes to stop drinking, go to bed, go to sleep, get up, wash, shave and look presentable enough to meet the client to do a interview with a downtown banker about middleware. But ICL weren’t fun at all, as 800 postmasters found out when they used their Horizon accounting system and went to prison, because the company wouldn’t tell the truth about it under the guise of client confidentiality. 

We already had doubts about the wisdom of taking them on because as a small research agency, cash flow was king, and while some of our nicest clients paid us within 48 hours because they valued what we did and wanted us to keep doing it, ICL demanded 90 days, not our usual 30-day terms with half on commissioning and half on completion.

Actual, verifiable lies

What we got was 90 days before the minimum of two total and utter lies about the sign-off and where the payment had got to. The record was five. Not mistakes. Actual lies, about invoices having been approved, or signed off or cheques sent.

We had more doubts when a straightforward presentation degenerated into two sides of the boardroom table hurling threats, insults and everything except chairs and laptops across it, during which we sat amazed and silent at how people who weren’t auditioning for The Sopranos actually behaved like this. But we’d been amazed earlier that day when only seven years after it had become established as a by-word for reliability one of ICL’s senior staff asked us whether we thought Linux would catch on. They weren’t joking.

Criminal fraud

When we found unarguable evidence of criminal fraud in their sales team, with a senior account manager happily billing for visits we proved never happened, to ‘regular clients’ who’d junked their ICL kit years previously, we were told we were ‘difficult to work with.’ It should have been a warning and we took it as one. After New York we didn’t pitch for any more work from ICL-Fujitsu. They clearly weren’t interested in the truth.

After we both separately became very ill indeed we wound-up the market research company. Looking for something to do I took over the Post Office in an idyllic Suffolk village, joined the Parish Council, opened a bijou little cafe-deli and looked forward to bucolic bliss at the heart of the community.

I was there when the previous Post-mistress was signed-out. Two people from the Post Office came to check the stock, the stamps, the tax discs, the money in the till and the money in the safe and to close the Horizon system down on her. They said that if the operator owed the Post Office money, it had to be paid there and then. The postmistress asked if she could check the inventory. They said yes. She asked if a cheque would be ok for the £200-odd she owed the Post Office, on the basis that Horizon said so. They said she could, and it would. She asked if that would be the full and final settlement, everything was closed, everything was accounted for, and again, they said it would be the end of it. I watched her write out the cheque, sign it and hand it over.

It doesn’t work like that

Then she reached for the roll of over a hundred tax discs and said, “So I’ll keep these, as they don’t exist.” They checked. According to Horizon, the roll of tax discs she was holding not only didn’t exist, it had never even been in the building. But the Post Office man spoke in the corporation’s true voice when he said, “Oh, I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that.”

It never did. Horizon, the Post Office and ICL-Fujitsu only ever spoke with one voice – Horizon cannot be wrong. The official view seemed to be that the post-masters and mistresses up and down the country fell into two groups: the ones who’ve fiddled the till and been convicted and the ones they hadn’t caught yet. That’s how it felt at the time.

You could spend hours after closing time trying to get Horizon to match what was in the till. Some days the error was more than we’d taken in the entire day, with Horizon and therefore the Post Office adamant that you may well say you only sold £160 worth of stamps, someone bought a £20 postal order, and someone else put £100 in their bank account, but Horizon shows there should be £400 in the till. If there isn’t, you have to put money in until there is. This reconciliation happened every day, with a big weekly session on Wednesday, which was supposed to be half-day closing. Which was nice, assuming you ever got out from behind the counter before six, trying to make Horizon balance with reality. 

There was a Horizon helpline, it’s true, but it closed on the stroke of 6pm. You couldn’t trial balance until the Post Office closed, so shutting the doors and turning the little sign on the door at 5:30 on the dot, you had ten minutes after you’d failed to trial balance to call them. Then you’d be told that it must be you, that nobody had ever had any issues like this ever before going back to the days of Roland Hill and that Horizon was never wrong. It couldn’t be. It was a computer system, by a British company that went back, like their attitudes, to 1919.

You’d go home wondering where you were going to find today’s shortfall but you also knew that sometimes, quite often, the system that couldn’t be altered would show a different figure in the morning. Or in two days. Or a week. Sometimes it was worse, and mine built up to well over £1,000 once, before it simply disappeared down to a couple of hundred. It was obvious someone was fiddling the figures and it certainly wasn’t me. I don’t know how to write computer code and the Horizon terminal wasn’t exactly easily accessible to input anything except money and stock in and out. I don’t know how much I put in to make up the shortfall the Post Office insisted I had when I was closed out, at the end of 2012. I don’t know how much I had put in during the time I was there. The Post Office had said I wasn’t allowed to keep my own records.

I remember clearly being thought of as a criminal liar, someone who was obviously fiddling the till every week, thinking if I kept it small and often the all-seeing Post Office wouldn’t notice. The woman who ran the Post Office in the next village tried to kill herself because of it.

Two years ago I was offered just over £2,000 as a full and final settlement. I thought it was the least they could do, so I accepted it.  Six weeks ago I had an email from the Post Office. It reminded me I’d accepted a full and final settlement. As it was from the Post Office, I assumed the rest of the email was going to tell me there was a mistake, I must have made it and they wanted the money back by return, or else. 

It didn’t say that. If it wasn’t a spoof or a phishing trip to get my account number out of me, the email offered me a shed-load of money as another full and final settlement, although disappointingly it didn’t say ‘and this time we really mean it, cross my heart and hope to die.’ But presumably Paula Vennells didn’t dictate this email personally. 

Confused doesn’t really sum-up how I felt. I thought win some, lose some, I thought that for a stupid scam it looked more than a bit official, with five pages and a plausible email address, and for all that it looked like a scam, asking for my bank account details, it didn’t ask for the three little numbers that would allow whoever was pretending to be the Post Office to go shopping on Amazon. I signed it anyway and waited for the up to ten working days the email said it would take to see the money in my bank.

I was online sitting through the weekly work meeting while waiting for lot 374 to come up at the Monday sale at the local auction house (‘a Henry vacuum cleaner, est. £20-£40’, property formerly hopefully of the deceased owner of a weekend home here in Suffolk, who used it once a week if that) when my phone pinged. Money in. The balance of a lot of money.

Since then it became more than slightly difficult to concentrate on my work, even if I’d liked working there in the first place. I had several first thoughts. Buy a ruin in France. Buy a field in England and a shepherd’s hut. I still quite like that idea. Give a friend some money to tide her through the cashflow issue that bothers her otherwise very nice business.

“I know nothing.”

I remember when that used to be a comedy catchphrase on Fawlty Towers, but I didn’t predict a future when the CEO of a massive national organisation felt it was all she needed to say to move things along. But I had another thought too, prompted by the memory of Paula Vennell’s pathetic sobbing, presumably because those awful men at the enquiry wouldn’t just shut up and leave her alone, because for heaven’s sake she was only the CEO of the Post Office, so how could she be expected to know what had been going on for a decade there? My other thought was that the money wasn’t enough.

I like having the money in the bank. It still feels odd to think that for all the times I’ve looked at Bentleys or Porsches and thought ‘ if I had the money I’d buy that’, well, now I could. And still have change. But it isn’t enough. No amount of money would be. Because the Horizon scandal wasn’t about the money. It was about an organisation and the people who worked for it knowing what the truth was and lying about it. It was about a one-way street, where the front-line staff who had to face the public were treated as liars and their lying seniors could be seen to do no wrong. If over 800 people had to go to prison, if some had to go bankrupt, or kill themselves, or lose their families, or have their entire community thinking they were thieves, then that was simply a price the Post Office was prepared to have their Postmasters pay.

This year, Paula Vennells had her title as Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the CBE, revoked for bringing the honours system into disrepute. She resigned as chair of the Imperial College NHS Trust in 2020, and in 2021 from her non-executive directorships at Dunelm and Morrisons. She’s even stopped being a vicar, notwithstanding the Church’s long-established practice of not asking too many questions about things that might not turn out to be true.

I’ve probably seen more pathetic and insincere things. It’s just that I can’t think of any.

In every email and letter I sent to the Post Office since 2012, I’ve told them they ought to be ashamed. I would be, if as a male CEO I thought I could get away with sobbing during my examination and seriously expected to get any job anywhere at all in future. In reality though, I’ve seen nothing that suggests anyone in charge at the Post Office or at ICL is, was, or will be ashamed. From where I sit looking at my shiny new bank account, it looks to me as if the only shame anyone at the top of the Post Office felt was the shame of being caught. I think I can safely assume it certainly won’t include the shame of a public criminal trial, a conviction or a prison sentence. 

But there’s no danger, it’s a professional career

That’s why the money isn’t enough and why no amount of money could be. It’s impossible to compensate for a system which says that like the friends of government ministers who were gifted £4 billion of tax money to supply defective PPE, the people at ICL and the Post Office who made the decision to prosecute their staff when they knew their system was defective won’t suffer in any way. They won’t be arrested, charged or go to court. That’s not the way things work now.

What Horizon demonstrated above anything wasn’t that people lie; some people always have. It demonstrated a more abstract concept, that when they do, some people who didn’t do anything wrong will go to prison while the people who lied get to keep their pensions. I was only following orders wasn’t accepted as a defence at Nuremberg. It feels odd knowing that I live in a country where that’s a more than adequate defence now.

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Another tank of gas

Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile….

Just before Christmas, on the shortest day, I did something I hadn’t done for thirty years and bought myself a motorcycle. The last one was a late 1980s 883cc purple metal flake Harley Sportster (Well, howdy!), which was low, sounded good and was nice to ride, but as every month went on, another £200 had to be spent to get it the way it should have been, I came to realise that there was more to the H-D experience than I’d imagined. It cost more, too, buying the parts to cure the faults that building down to a cost to sucker the buyers inevitably meant. 

Some of the issues were weird, like how it was geared for 55mph in top, which was the US speed limit, but the speedometer was in miles per hour. Maybe the bike was some grey import as I’d bought it second-hand but with only about 1500 miles. Whether or not it was, the inlet manifold shouldn’t have split. Being told, ‘Yeah, they all do that, mate,’ didn’t help. Why did they? 

Metal fatigue

‘Er… metal fatigue, innit’ didn’t reassure. 

Any metal getting fatigued on a fifteen-hundred-mile motorcycle ought never to have been on there in the first place. The dealership got arsey when I said that and came back with, ‘Yeah, we just take your money, don’t we?’ Which, so far as I could see, was true. Telling the guy he’d got a lot of attitude for someone who’d just had £3,500 off me didn’t seem to help, somehow.

They fixed it, and I chugged off over the blue horizon. But first, I had to find some decent brakes, and a four-piston Brembo sorted that out. The vibration was something else, cured by a Bar Snake, not to be confused with a lounge lizard. Essentially, it’s a solid, bendy rubber hose. The idea was and probably still is to stuff it inside the handlebars where it’ll vibrate at a different frequency than the bars and cancel the vibes out. Then, you might see what’s in the mirrors at speeds over 25 mph.

The tyres lasted 3,000 miles. The spark plugs didn’t seem to. The battery box didn’t either, because there wasn’t until I found one in a spare box at some non-main dealer place, the rip-off artists near Greenwich, or the surprisingly pleasant Hells Angel shop down in Kent somewhere. I knew which I preferred dealing with, and it wasn’t Fred Warr’s in World’s End, one of the most unfriendly dealers I’ve ever come across. Maybe it was because I didn’t buy it there, maybe … I don’t know what it was. Maybe they were just arses. They acted like it. 

It got stolen and dumped in a field. We found and recovered it, then I used the insurance money to bore it out to 1200, put a Mikuni injector on it to replace the carburettor, got rid of that biscuit-tin air filter and stuck Kuryakin footpegs on it, despite wondering all the while why one the blond Man From Uncle was messing around with motorcycle parts. A lot of people have a side hustle. New coil, new plugs, new leads, and paint the tank jet black, and it was good to go. It did, and I used the money to buy a laptop and a mono laser printer. There wasn’t much change, or not from the money I got for it, anyway.

A message from the spirit world

A strange thing happened a couple of months later. A friend’s sister knew the person who’d bought it. She told me it had broken down and wouldn’t start. I talked to the guy on the phone because despite everything else that had happened with the little Sportster, not starting wasn’t one of them. He’d tried everything and had no luck.

At about the same time, someone I knew went to see a medium, a descendant of Admiral Dampier, no less, although the two events were unrelated. Out of nowhere, the medium claimed she had a message about the motorcycle her client’s friend had just sold, purportedly from her father. He’d been an army despatch rider in Burma back in 1945. Tell him it’s the coil.

My friend dutifully relayed the message, and I told her she was talking out of her rear end. When did you hear of a brand new, out-of-the-box coil failing these days?

Except it was.

Nothing even vaguely supernatural has happened with the F650 I bought to get back into bikes after a 30-year break, nor the R1150R that replaced that. Nothing remotely spooky has gone on with the Ducati Scrambler I bought a couple of weeks ago. Not unless you count the Ducati’s unearthly ability to need its cam belts replaced every five years, whether you ride it or leave it in the garage or the 1150’s habit of growing heavier the longer you don’t ride it. 

I don’t know what to make of spirit messages from beyond the grave diagnosing Harley-Davidson replacement parts with 100% accuracy. I gave up on H-D a long time ago, anyway. The past is a different country; besides, the wench’s father was dead.

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The silence of the lands

It was probably today, but it might have been Friday. Either way it was a long time ago and Easter. I realised years ago that there was something wrong with my hearing. I’d get things wrong, not understand what people said they’d said, be accused of not listening when in fact I was listening as best I could. But the day like today, the day I’m thinking of at Easter all that time ago, it was the silence that was the loudest thing.

It wasn’t a religious experience, or maybe it was. Back in that Easter long ago I’d gone to my school with my friend Phil. We kept two Enterprise dinghies in winter storage under the parquet floor of the solid municipal 1930s assembly room in what had been the old Girls School before the co-ed revolution. The only reason Phil and I were there was to paint the boats for the new season. It took most of the day, a lot longer than we thought it would, to sand them down in a world when 17-year-olds didn’t have power sanders. But then, we didn’t have the right colour paint either, or not the colour we’d thought we were buying.

We spent all that time working on those boats and talking about the girls we knew and our plans, our huge teenage plans, although mostly those involved the desperate difficulty of finding a venue and then possibly less difficult, removing the clothing from those same girls rather than anything more long-term advantageous or profound. I remember that day a lot though, and I remember the silence we had as well, just working together on something we wanted to do, as well as the talk about the other thing we wanted to do. We got the boats painted, at least.

I had a brilliant Easter this year. Walking around Norwich on Friday, exploring Beccles on Saturday, then trying to find breakfast on Sunday, finding the Common Room in Framlingham closed, finding we didn’t want breakfast at The Crown, driving to Aldeburgh and fish and chips there, then realising I’d left my scarf in Framlingham and having to drive all the way back there, then a glass of wine at the Easton White Horse, then a junk shop where I bought a tyre iron and on to Seckford Hall, a secret place we found where for the price of a pot of tea you can pretend Enid Blyton will be along any minute now and you really do live in the style of Downton Abbey every day. It was good in the end, but a bit unsettling and 8 hours is a long time to spend going out for breakfast. It was gone six by the time we got back, the day the clocks sprang forward. Best beloved went to make a headstart on her accounts, I went shooting.

It was ok, considering the light was going and I was having to re-focus the scope to get a clear sight-picture every few shots by the last target, which was this one, a decent card apart from the one stupid flyer.

The range I shoot at is walking distance from where I live, so that’s what I did, walk there. I left the target rest in the boot of my car and just took my best rifle and a bag of ear defenders, ammunition, my sighting target, a pen and a bronze caliper to measure the size of the group of ten shots.

Then I walked back, gone seven in the evening, the few birds singing, the air still. But what I noticed most was the silence as I walked along the lane, the same sound I’d heard that other Easter, at the other end of the span of my life.

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A possible isn’t good enough

When I was a boy I used to shoot at the local rifle club every Thursday. I tried, but I wasn’t much good. I couldn’t see very well, the light was appallingly bad with a lot of glare, we had to lie on kapok mats impregnated with sweat every Thursday since the Boar War, which since you ask was a lot of Thursdays, thanks. I got eczema on my fingers from the lubricant on the bullets and the dust and fumes in that unventilated underground range made my chest feel funny most of the next day.

I shot around 94/100, usually. I was just about good enough to go to Bisley when I was fifteen, and I qualified as an adult marksman, so I can’t have been that bad, but shooting is always about being better.

This was last Friday’s target. Where I live, I’m lucky enough to have a range literally within walking distance, so after work, I put my best gun in its bag, grabbed my shooting bag with its ear defenders and sighting target and a screwdriver just in case, and walked down the hill, along the lane, and across the little bridge over the headwaters of the Deben to the old range. Maybe it started off as a quarry, I don’t know, but I do know that during the war, it was used by the tanks stationed at Glemham Hall to sight in their machine guns, trundling and squeaking and clanking their way down what’s still called Tank Road. It accounts for the sign that’s on the bridge now, saying “No Track Laying Vehicles. The local Home Guard used it for practising when they weren’t doing that.

The Hostile Coast

About a decade ago the local airfield opened the first and so far as I know the only museum to the Auxiliary Home Guard, the real suicide squad, whose job in case of invasion was to go to ground for two weeks and then slaughter as many Germans as they could, along with a select list of people who might be useful to an invading Nazi force. We’re not even ten miles from Shingle Street. This was a hostile coast.

Back in the now, though, or anyway, last Friday, I shot my first ever possible. It was with my lovely HW 77, not the 97 I wrote on the target, the first gun I ever bought new last September. First time out I shot a ten-shot group in 11mm, something I’ve never been able to do since. That’s why my possible 100 out of 100 wasn’t good enough.

As you can see from the picture, the hole at the top right was a snatched shot where I jerked the trigger. It cut the line between the nine and the ten, so it counts as a ten, but that’s not the problem—although obviously, it’s one of them. The big problem is the size of the group—twenty-two millimetres.

It’s not showing off. Ok, it’s a possible. Ok, it’s 100 out of 100. And yes, I was using a rest, thanks. It’s the size of the group. It’s double the spread of the first group I ever shot with this rifle. And I don’t know why. It’s almost as if it’s my shooting that’s at fault, and that can’t be right.

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Nearly Spring

But he was a young man, and the song of the lark made him blissfully happy, stirring the old longing that had accompanied him from Hammont. He felt as if someone were walking behind him with light footsteps, calling his name softly and tenderly.

When he stopped and turned to listen the voice stopped calling out, but when he turned back he felt the presence behind him again, as if it were trying to play a trick on him.

Hans Grimm, “Schlump.” 1928

They turned All Quiet On The Western Front into a Netflix movie, but the year before it was published, Schlump was out in print. It’s similar but not the same, about someone a lot younger than me now, who had the misfortune to be born just before my grandfather’s time and in a different country, so ending up in a trench in France with people like my grandfather, country boys from another country, trying to kill him every day.

I don’t know how that time was. But I’ve had the same feeling sometimes, that something young and happy is looking after me, but only when you’re out of doors, alone, in the sunlight.

And as soon as you stop to think, ‘So what actually is that?’ then it’s gone. I used to know it would be back. This cold, sodden, windy Spring it’s going to be a long time coming.

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Doubling down

Winter is coming.

It really is. There were storms at the weekend, with seaweed blown all over Whisstocks yard. The weekend before the Longshed was flooded, interrupting the work of recreating the ship buried at Sutton Hoo. There was a very high tide and the flood barriers swung shut, but either the water seeped underneath or the holding tank was full or the drain from the holding tank was blocked nobody really knew, but either way all the work on the re-creation of King Raedwald’s ship stopped, assuming it was his ship in the first place.

Monday and Tuesday by contrast have been Force 2 winds, and skies that cleared by ten, but frost on the cars this morning. Not ideal sailing weather, so I went to check the boat over anyway, and to do some basic winter preparations.

The first thing was to make sure the sails were tied to the yards so they literally didn’t flog themselves to death. Someone lost their jib the winter before last when they left their sails to flap for a month. All they had left were rags when they came back to their boat. The second job was to double-up the lines fore and aft. My Drascombe lives on a mooring in Martlesham Creek, tied at both ends to bouys floating in the river. A couple of weeks ago I bought one of those magic mooring sticks at Andy Seedhouse’s used chandlery, to see if they worked and they do, so all the better that I only paid £20 for a used one instead of the £150 figures I’ve seen online. In case you don’t know, it’s a fork with a pivoted bar over the end, with a line tied to one end of the bar. Tie that to the line on your boat you want to go through the ring on top of your mooring buoy, close the bar, push the fork at the ring, then when it’s gone through pull the fork backwards and somehow, like a conjuring trick, you’ve pulled your line through the hoop on the mooring buoy without having to dangle over the side of the boat threading a piece of rope through a moving ring while your boat floats past. Sometimes with un-hilarious consequences. Anyway, played with that for a bit to check the magic was still working. It was.

The next job was to start the engine, for two reasons. I wanted to get all the fuel out of the carburetor as I wasn’t quite sure when I’d be starting it up again, and the best way of getting rid of the fuel in the engine was to run it. But secondly, I wanted to check the fuel can wasn’t leaking anymore. Which it was, out of the junction of the outlet pipe. I’d fitted a new bronze hollow threaded pipe last week, but although that had stopped one leak there was another still going strong. A month ago I lost the better part of £10 of petrol like that, without the boat going anywhere at all. £10 is one thing, but more irritating was the fact that the idea of leaving the petrol can connected onboard was so the boat was ready to go next time I got down to it. Without petrol, it wasn’t. Petrol can back in the dinghy and a trip to the hardware store for some rubber rings and Vaseline.

Next, the cover. I haven’t had the cover fastened on the boat since June, and this year she went into the water the first week of May. It’s now the first week of November, so we’ve had a solid six months of sailing even if we don’t get any more this year. Which I haven’t decided yet. Before I put the cover on though, there’s the bird crap to get rid of. When I was a boy I was told those big, strange-looking black birds, the ones that stand on top of posts with their wings bent outstretched, those are called cormorants and when you grow up you won’t see them any more, because they’ll be extinct.

Well, they aren’t. Not by a long way. There are three main kinds of birds that arse about on my boat when I’m not there. The redshanks and avocets and the sandpipers and egrets leave it alone because they’re too busy wading about on the mud looking for their tea. And yes, I had to look them up to find out their names but they’re all there, all the time. They aren’t the problem. The gulls, the swans and the cormorants are.

Gulls just sit on top of the mast and use it as a hi-rise lavatory. That always falls in the same place, on the thwart at the base of the mast, port side. The swans – you always know when a swan’s been on board, not just by the size of the green pile of droppings but by the massive muddy webbed footprints all over the boat. No swans today. But the cormorants that didn’t go extinct. It’s not just their waste. It’s not just their muddy feet. It’s the way they dismember crabs. I didn’t even know there were crabs in the Deben, but unless they’re flying to Adleburgh deli there definitely are. And they eat them on my boat, so apart from scrubbing away their muddy track marks and the piles of guano I get to pick crab legs out of the gaps in the floorboards as well.

But all done for the day. I think the petrol can is sealing now. There are two lines at the bow and two lines at the stern, holding the boat snug against any gale. The PVC cover is on tight, held up to two peaks by a line strung between the masts. The sails are lashed tight to the yards. There’s a line of algae growth on the hullmaking a mockery of the words ‘anti-foul,’ but there is on every other boat on this river, whatever your boat and whatever brand of antifoul anyone’s used. I’ve paid for the mooring up to the 5th December and maybe, I told my loyal and trusty crew today, she needs to come out of the water then so I can blast away the algae, repaint the hull and maybe fix those hairline cracks in the gel-coat on the deck. Or just paint it, I was told.

I can’t recall how long into the winter we used to sail at school and somehow, although it was about four million years ago, it seems to matter. There won’t always be another sailing season. There won’t be another forty of them ahead, as there were at school. But it’s all snugged down tight and survivable onboard, safe against the winter winds. In six weeks it’ll start to get lighter in the evenings again, quicker than you’ll think possible. All you have to do is stay warm and remember winter goes away. It’s all ok for now.

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That sinking feeling

I’ve only had it once that wasn’t in a dream. Literally, that sinking feeling, when there’s water coming up past the floorboards inside the boat and despite the fact you know, really you know, that thanks to the mud that makes up a large part of the River Deben, your boat can only possibly sink about two feet at most, given the tide, some primeval part of your brain is screaming much louder than the rational part. And it’s screaming something you don’t want to hear.

“You’re going to die! Very soon! do something!”

I’d had my boat out of the water for several years. I bought it when it had been out for at least two. I worked on it, sanded it, varnished it, painted it, antifouled it, made it look what used to be called all shipshape and Bristol fashion, which doesn’t mean it looked like gigantic breasts because that would be too silly. What I couldn’t do anything about was the fact that it had been out of the water for years and it was a wooden boat. They dry out. The wood shrinks. And the gaps between the planks that make up the hull don’t. In fact, they do the opposite.

I’d told Everson’s boatyard, the one with the crane to put it in the slings on Monday and crane it into the water, leave it on the slip in the slings and I’d come down again on Tuesday to sail it away.

A friend took the day off work to come down on Monday with me to see what was happening. As it turned out, nothing was. The crane driver was off sick. Monday. Nothing to do with a hangover, obviously. It never was when staff went sick on Monday at my company, after all. Ever. Whatever the reason, the boat wasn’t in its sling and the sling wasn’t on the crane. Apparently, their phone had broken as well, as they hadn’t told me not to bother driving down there and wasting my time.

When I came back on Tuesday, without my friend who was going to crew, they hadn’t even bothered to start the crane up. When they eventually did get the boat into the water it leaked. A lot. It’s called ‘taking-up.’ It means the water flows pretty much uninterrupted through the gaps between the planks. This is why you put the boat in the water the day before you want it. Except the yard couldn’t be bothered to do that, or to tell me they hadn’t.

The pump worked. It had to.

It’s only about a mile down the Deben to Kyson’s Point. You turn 90 degrees West there and it’s about another much more winding mile to the mooring. I did it all under engine and everything, on this sunny day, seemed fine. The engine started up, the pump was pumping hard, no wind to speak of, it was just gone High Water and I had a new job starting the next day, teaching at a French summer school on the banks of the Stour, then starting a screenplay for Film Suffolk. Plus I had a lovely boat under me. Life was good.

dav

Life started to get less good when I got to the end of Martlesham Creek to find two things I hadn’t planned. First, the boat that was supposed to be out of my berth on the jetty was very much still in my berth on the jetty, and there wasn’t room for two. Second, and more immediately pressing, was the fact that the pump wasn’t keeping up with the inrush of water, as I saw when I looked down into the cabin and saw the floorboards floating. I did that because the odd noise I’d heard was an automatic lifejacket stowed under the seats had done what it was supposed to do when it was under water.

Don’t panic! Don’t panic!

Except I didn’t know what else to do. I’m in a rapidly drying-out channel, I can’t get onto my berth and the boat I’ve spent months making nice is sinking. It’s actually sinking. And I’m probably going to be drowned.

The fact I had a lifejacket on, the fact it could only sensibly have sunk about three feet at most, the fact that I could have stood on the cabin roof if it did without getting my sailing wellies wet, none of that came into my thoughts at all. The only thing that did was a primeval fear of drowning.

And of course, I didn’t drown. And nor did the boat actually sink, or not much more than it had, anyway. The boatyard owner told me to moor on the end of the jetty. When my voice was somewhere near a normal register I told him what was happening, so he told me to just point the boat at the bank and open the throttle. We’d sort it out later. Over there, between those two boats. I went for the gap, Fern softly stopped, we put some lines out fore and aft and that was pretty much that.

We got a big petrol-driven pump onboard and cleared her, then rigged a float so it would kick in if the water kept on coming in. From the streams of water visible under the cockpit floorboards that looked likely. I had to go to school so I couldn’t see Fern for about ten days after that. I ordered some caulking cotton and Stockholm tar but stopped short of buying proper caulking irons which was just as well, as Fern stopped leaking – sorry, taking-up – on the second day in her new berth, the yard told me. They’d checked. I’ve never caulked anything, then or since and never needed to.

I learned what a good boatyard I’d chosen, totally by accident, tucked away at the end of a forgotten creek in Suffolk. I learned that the tide goes out far and fast there too.

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On the road

Snarkness on the edge of town.

There’s a new movie out. In fact, like my revisited reaction to On The Road, the novel, when I saw the 2012 film for the first time the other night, there isn’t. It’s on Channel 4, if you’re interested. And maybe, as I was, you ought to be. It’s about an America that just after the war a group of young-ish people went looking for. Except they weren’t that young, having been you can find out online well out of their teens and for better or worse, having grown-up first in the Great Depression, which affected almost absolutely everybody, and then in the Second World War, which laughably or otherwise after Pearl Harbor charged many Americans with the belief that they had almost a spiritual need, call and duty to save the world, first and foremost by being American and secondly, almost incidentally, by killing Krauts and Japs, much as them pesky Redskins had been in the way of their grandparents’ manifest destiny.

Mommy’s Boy with ishoos has a mahoosive crush on this glamorous waste of space who gives him a free go on his girlfriend and travels across the country with him several times, by car, pickup truck, freight train and hitchhiking. The people they inevitably meet, history being inevitable, as Malcolm Bradbury’s Howard Kirk reminds us all, turn out equally inevitably to be either a) wild crazy hipster cats and proto-Beatniks who know no boundaries; or b) racked with wild and indescribable sadnesses the narrator thinks are the soul of proto-America ( so long as they ain’t Injuns who don’t get a look-in, obviously); or c) both.

The more I watched the movie the more I remembered things from the past, mine and Jack Kerouac’s. I loved this book and the way it changed my life when I was walking the mean streets of Trowbridge on my paper round. It made me go on my own road trip, one I planned for years and finally did, ten years later. It also reminded me how yes, I’d met people like that. And I also remembered I’d learned to avoid total self-absorbed blagging ego-centric arses, but only too slowly. As shop signs about asking for credit used to say, a punch in the mouth often offends, but equally often looking back it would have probably been the right thing to do.

But at thirteen, posting copies of the Bath Evening Chronicle through letterboxes in the gathering dusk on Pitman Avenue, (yes, the shorthand Pitman, he lived in Trowbridge, there’s a plaque about it where that policeman got stabbed) On The Road was a hymn to freedom. Not many years after that I read something written on a barn wall.

“Freedom? Are the sparrows free from the chains of the sky?”

Which for graffiti on a barn full of bits of ancient motorcycles that today would be somebody’s entire and very generous pension fund and then at best was some greasy hippy with a stupid name’s falling-down shed full of rubbish, was a pretty acute observation, then or now. Dean Moriarty’s 1949 Hudson didn’t buy itself. On the truck farm where Sal Paradise met his Mexican – ooops, sorry, Latino – stoop labour girlfriend, if you didn’t work you didn’t get paid and that meant you didn’t eat. Working for a pittance isn’t freedom, as he found out. It was no more real than paying your mortgage off, or getting your book about it published. And it was no more “America” than say, Sergeant York was a typical conscientious objector. The America of Mad Men and Wall Street, let alone Breaking Bad and 24 didn’t even exist in America back when Kerouac rode the range. They didn’t have Interstate highways back then. There wasn’t even a proper road when the US Army drove coast to coast in 1919. Aspen – yes, THAT Aspen, Dallas-opening-credits Aspen – didn’t have tarmac on its Main street until 1960.

But I didn’t know all that on Elmdale, Blair and Eastview, bringing the evening news about Chilean refugees to the good folk of West Wiltshire, first on my rubbish scrap bike then when I was 14, on my lime green metal flake Carlton Continental, £40 on installments to my mother, when £40 was a pretty big deal. What I thought was a pretty big deal by then was Hunter S. Thompson.

For our younger readers, HST was a man who wrote stuff. What he wanted to write was The Great American Novel, so after he was kicked out of the US Airforce, for many of the reasons Kerouac was kicked out of the US Navy, he went off to Big Sur and wrote in the place where Kerouac visited while Thompson was doing odd jobs, where Hemingway shot himself and Richard Brautigan did the same. Maybe it was something in the water. Or maybe it was because all of them were regularly off their face. Either way, Thompson learned that however much he got off his own face absolutely nobody wanted to publish his fiction, although ultimately that’s exactly what happened in a way he didn’t predict.

In San Francisco at the dawn of the 1960s he bought a Triumph motorcycle and rode around with the Hell’s Angels, always something of a high-risk hobby and one that ended the way a six year-old might predict. He wrote what I’ve always thought the best sociological study of a marginalised group I’ve ever read, the not-very-originally-titled Hells Angels: the Strange And Terrible Saga Of The Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, which absolutely no Sociology lecturer I ever met at the University of Bath ever felt necessary to discuss or even acknowledge it existed.

The paralysing straightjacket of the legend Thompson became holds that he was way out there on the edge, feeling no fear. If you watch his post-being-beaten-up-by-them televised encounter with one of the Angels he used to hang around with, you’ll see for yourself what a crock that was.

But I didn’t know that either, back then. All I wanted to do was go to America and meet Hunter Thompson, then make a living writing like him. I did half of that.

I got the opportunity in the early 1980s to go to teach kids to shoot on a summer camp in Wisconsin. I found several things there; guns, cheerleaders called Nancy-Jean, a lake we parked by in the best Meatloaf tradition. I also found a Chevrolet Kingswood, a laughably massive estate car that did nine to the gallon around any town and a thrifty fifteen on the open road. Apart from the time I drove up over the Rockies, stopped for a break and when I tested the new puddle on the road below the exhaust pipe, when it seemed to be blowing petrol stright through, unburned. That was a Kerouac day, getting clean in a creek next to the road, seeing my big toenail turn the same colour as my jeans and only discovering later the water was so cold because it was glacier run-off; blowing a cooling hose on the plateau southeast of Buena Vista and getting a lift from a truckload of Latino migrant workers to a garage open on a Sunday that sold me a top hose for 82 cents. Like the dog named Boo, a screwdriver, a Jubilee clip and another tank of gas and we were back on the road again.

Was it worth watching? Yes. For me, anyway. Was it worth doing it, any of it? Kerouac’s road trip, Thompson’s desert run to Vegas, my own, more pedestrian meandering from Eagle River to Greencastle to Terre Haute, through tiny river towns of Missouri to St Louis guided by the Rand-McNally and stopping at gunshops – the easiest place to talk to strangers if you spoke the language, and thanks to shooting at Bisley and a summer of teaching it, I did, back then. After an abortive Saturday spent first driving through an electric storm, then in definitively the worst bar I’ve ever been in in my entire life, a barn of a place in Colby, KS, where everyone was carded on the door and bar staff wore Mace canisters on their belts I headed southwest towards Colorado Springs and then up over the first ridge of the Rockies.

On the last day of August I drove down Independence Pass into Aspen and my life changed. I don’t think it ever went back to how it had been before, but anyone can say that about pretty much any day they care to name, if they can remember it at all. There were some serious things wrong with the place, like oh, I don’t know, Goldie Hawn not looking like Private Benjamin when she went to the thrift store (no she didn’t and yes she did, respectively), Andy Williams reportedly buying-off the police investigation when someone got themselves shot dead in very odd circumstances, someone else deciding to sort-out who was going to bed with who with an AR-15 one dark night on a quiet backwoods track, or the dealer guy who got into his Jeep one fine day, turned the key and didn’t have time to even sing man, that’s all she wrote when it exploded. But hey, nobody ever said Aspen was perfect. It just pretty much was, a place of sun and snow and good-looking people and what looked like open-ness, a place where the dustman’s dollar was as good as John Denver’s in any restaurant. Cash, obviously.

Fat City

I tracked HST down to his house outside the city eventually. It took a little while, not least because some people thought I was a cop or someone serving a warrant and some just didn’t like him or the attention he brought to the town. He stood for Sherrif in the early 1970s and at least according to him, came within a spit of getting elected. One of the things he proposed still makes sense, renaming Aspen officially as Fat City. That way the people who just wanted to live somewhere quiet and beautiful, or the people who wanted to play music or listen to it instead of being seen going to listen to it, or the people who just wanted to be left alone to ski could get on and do that. Meanwhile the shopping malls and developers and people selling $200 T-shirts would have a hard time getting start-up funding for the Fat City Apres-Skiwear Boutique or Fat City Jetplane Concierge LLC. You can see the problem.

Thompson got himself arrested for sexual assault around about that time, which took the edge off wanting to be like him, for me at least. Last time I saw him was standing alone on West Hyman, very tall and balding in the sunlight, absorbed in something I’d now say was a mobile phone message, but couldn’t have been back then. I never knew what it was. But by then I didn’t care that much what he did. Nor, to be honest, what Kerouac did. I had my own things to do. I just wish I could have done them in that golden place on the Western slope of the Rockies a lifetime longer. Just like paradise by the dashboard light, it was long ago and it was far away. Still, as Bruce Springsteen told me personally, nothing we can say or do is going to change anything now.

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