Back Into It

I thought it was Spring. The clocks went forward (Spring forward, Fall back, although being English we don’t have – and you have to make an inverted commas sign with your fingers here and do a little moue at the same time -“Fall”. It’s called Autumn). I went out without a coat for the first time this year. I went to have a look at my lovely boat, looking a little less lovely after being covered in fallen leaves all over the cockpit, but the cabin roof scrubbed up nicely in less than a half hour. The fact that all the mould I cleaned off was sluiced off the roof by that night’s rain should have been a lesson. It’s only just April.

I’ve been travelling for most of March, all over Scotland and Ireland, then a week at home, then London and the Cotswolds. Five days at home and now London and the Cotswolds again, shepherding American tourists while I wait to hear from the Maison des Scenaristes about Janni Schenck and the Cannes Film Festival. It’s entered for it. Did I mention that?

No? Really? Well, my screenplay, Janni Schenck, is entered for the Cannes Film Festival.

Thank-you. I’m rather pleased.

But right now I have to phone some restaurants and get to a hotel near Heathrow to sleep on my own on a Saturday night. At least they do a very, very good vegetarian pizza. Probably the best I’ve ever eaten. Ain’t life grand?

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Putting-up

I spent fifteen years telling myself I couldn’t do something. Which was stupid, because that always turns out to be true. To be accurate I spent thirteen years doing that and another two years thinking I had to do it but I didn’t know how. Then a year seriously thinking about how I was going to do it.

It was a story. The problem was it was true. The bigger problem was it happened in a Germany that has thankfully disappeared, which I knew next to nothing about. Not least as I didn’t speak German.
https://youtu.be/E7IVGBWV8cc

I didn’t want to be the sad bloke with shelves full of books with swastikas on the spine. Even after I learned they’re called hakencruzen. I read everything I could, buying books from boot-sales, second-hand shops, anywhere. What I didn’t want was military history. I needed to know how a village worked. What people had for breakfast in 1945. What the newspaper was called.

I had the story: I’d heard it first-hand. I needed the framework it happened in. And the reality of that wasn’t anything you’ve ever seen on TV. You think you know about it from the graphic violence of Saving Private Ryan or the extended buddy movie treatment of Band of Brothers. You don’t. Even Der Untergang doesn’t touch on what happened to ordinary people, the millions of people who just happened to be born at a place, at a time. Who could have been anybody. Who could have been you.

I hadn’t the first clue before I started this what had happened to ordinary people. I got my first clue talking to a German woman about her town. I’d asked her what’s it like?

Oh, quite new houses, like any other town in the north of Germany, she’d said. And the old town? Well, the RAF took care of the old town one night in late March 1945. Chiefly because they could. It shocked me. It still does. And before anyone jumps up and down screaming about the Blitz, yes. Awful. About 40,000 British people died from German bombing in the war. About 40,000 people died in three nights of bombing by the RAF in Hamburg. Something else they forgot to mention at my school, along with the whole idea of German resistance to Nazism which by its nature, was quite secretive and predictably and inevitably short-lived. It must have been exactly the same as in places like Syria now. “Why didn’t you fight it?” always comes up against “How?”

It must have been exactly the same as in places like Syria now. “Why didn’t you fight it?” always comes up against “How?” When the police take away everyone in the house next door, what are you going to do? Call the police? Maybe write to your MP? Fight them, the same way refugees are told they should, with sticks against rifles? And there’s always plenty more room on the truck. But some people stood up.

I turned it into a screenplay, Janni Schenk. One person refused to read it twice because it upset her so much the first time. It’s not graphic violence. The body count is very low and almost all of it happens out of shot. It’s a very simple story. Almost all of it is true.

An orphaned boy is betrayed by his country, his youth-group and his school-teacher before he saves his village from total destruction.

Except his youth-group was the Hitler Jugend. And the people about to destroy his village were the US Army. And for that reason alone I don’t think any film-maker outside Germany is going to touch it with gloves on. Certainly not an American film-maker. But let’s see. Maybe I’ll be wrong.

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Big

Long, long ago, so long ago in fact that people didn’t even think Band of Brothers was a documentary (It was the American Rangers who somewhat foolishly parachuted into Arnhem was it? Really? Not the British at all. Let’s move on, shall we?), Tom Hanks made a film called Big.

It was about a boy who makes a wish and turns into a good-looking man in his twenties. Except only his body does. He doesn’t know the rules. While he’d grown-up, (and yes, obviously he checks and yes, obviously) he hadn’t at all where it counts, inside his head. He hadn’t any of the knowledge and experience people assumed he had by looking at him. And it mattered, not least because it left him bewildered and frightened knowing that as Donald Rumsfeld put it, there are known unknowns. Lots of them.

I had much the same thing dealing with the AA this week, exploring the gap between the fact of them being a huge corporation and people sharing knowledge. Because they don’t.

Once upon a time I used to be a partner in a research consultancy. Two of us started it and at one point we had over fifty people working there. But an issue we faced again and again pitching to large corporations was size.

But you’re not very big, it goes. What happens if something happens to one of you when you’re working on our project? That’s the reason we’re reluctant to use you.

Which was true, because although or maybe because we were small, we were extraordinarily good. We did things nobody had ever done before. Interviewed sailors on ships, for example. First face to face all over the world, then by satellite phone. When one of us had a cerebral aneurism in the middle of the most massive job we’d ever had, when the other of us had five DVT episodes, in other words when you could have flipped a coin to predict the odds of either of us ending up dead within the day the client didn’t even notice. Because nothing at all happened to their projects. The other partner picked it up. That’s what partners do. If they’re proper partners, anyway.

The joke is that is emphatically NOT what happens in a corporation. When someone goes on holiday or off sick, more often than not whatever it is they’re working on comes to a halt. Then you’re told ‘it’s only ten days. It’s a planned event.’ But the job’s still stopped dead. One corporate client told me it was ‘impossible’ to get a piece of paper three doors down a corridor in the same time that I was supposed to get a team of interviewers from Luton to Singapore. It couldn’t be done. Hiring a smaller agency creates risk. In that specific case the risk was the smaller agency saying that the Terms & Conditions hadn’t been agreed for the fun of it and if they weren’t honoured the job was stopping until they had, your choice. Apparently this falls under the category ‘difficult to work with.’

The risk was the same this week. I’d sent email to someone at a corporation. They p0honed me up and we had a chat and everything was proceeding smoothly. Then they phoned in sick. And nobody but nobody, knew anything about the conversation, the email or anything else. We had to start again. Which we did and it was fine, except it took a week instead of the day it should have done. I don’t particularly mind that, although it’s inconvenient. I mind the total, over-riding assumption that this is exactly and precisely what doesn’t happen specifically because a large organisation has more people, when so far as I’ve seen it’s exactly and precisely what does.

As for Tom Hanks, at least he had the good grace to get shot in Private Ryan.

 

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A Working Synopsis

Janni Schenk

 

Janni Schenk is a German boy of about 14 whose family are dead. Displaced to a rural village he brings with him his injured cat, his hobby repairing radios and his love of both the Hitler Youth movement he was conscripted into and Swing music introduced to him by his aunt Hannah, who adopts him. His story moves between Hamburg, the last day of his war in the mountain village of Fall and the present day in England, where he lives as an old man. Every incident in this screenplay happened. Otto Horst was a real person who saved the lives of the Hitler Youth Boys. Janni Schenck told me his story first hand, although I never knew his real name. Every time I thought of him Janni’s name came to me. Recently I found that Christa Schroeder, one of Hitler’s secretaries, was employed after the war by a Herr Schenk, in pretty much the same area where this story is set, southwest Germany, in April 1945. Otto Bachler was also a real person, although a surgeon, not an accountant. He made a joke about Hitler and was to be executed when partisans attacked. He walked from Romania to Bremen and saw the destruction of Dresden on the way. He lived to a ripe old age as a doctor in West Germany. His grand-daughter showed me his surgical needles and told me his story.

Every musical detail is accurate, including the edict about the rules for Swing tunes. This is not a normal war story. Some people may find Janni not very likeable. I think he is a normal boy of his age and background. Above all else, he was a victim. He was fooled into thinking the drums and flags and songs and guns were a noble cause. He was fooled by the SS into trying to save his village, which would have cost him his life while they got away to live in comfort. Finally Janni was betrayed by the man who saved his life, necessarily, the schoolteacher and head of the Hitler Youth troop who he had trusted implicitly.

Janni’s aunt is reunited with her husband who she thought was dead. Janni and the schoolmaster survive. The fervent Nazi dies, along with Otto who was only trying to get home. Swing music makes the Americans pause long enough to decide not to destroy the village. And Janni’s music, the Swing music that got him through, that survived too, as the soundtrack for both sides. But the songs of the Hitler Youth, their pledge of loyalty to the father of their new nation were all a lie. Their fatherland was abusive. The dream was sour. But even from the hatefulness of that premise, life went on. Janni and Germany made things better, for everyone. Things can change. Good will come. It’s just that sometimes you can’t see when or how.

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Janni Schenck

It was a summer afternoon about 16 years ago and I had nothing much to do that wouldn’t wait. I walked across the fields, down the hill and over the canal and the little river, then up the hill the other side of the valley, to a pub nearly at the top, near the Rudolf Steiner school. An old man was in there, having a loud argument with a fat Enlighs skinhead.

I’d seen the old man before. The first time I noticed his white flowing hair and aquiline nose and said to my partner ‘Look, that’s Rudolf Steiner,” but she unsportingly didn’t laugh. He was getting louder this time. Then I heard the words “Hitler Youth,” which are not words you often hear in Home Counties pubs, even if there are fat skinheads there. I’d assumed it was the large, bald bloke. And I was wrong.

It was the old man who’d spoken about the Hitler Youth. They were great, he said. And he should know, because he was one. Or had been then. What had made him incandescent with anger was being called a Nazi. You had to join the Nazi Party, he shouted at the other man, who was probably not a skinhead really, just fat and bald with a London-diaspora voice. And sixteen million people had. But you didn’t get the choice about joining the Hitler Youth. You go a card on your thirteenth birthday, telling you that you were a member. Your choice what happened next.

I’ve always thought of him as Janni Schenck. I wrote his story.

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Dad’s Army: This time it’s impersonal

I saw it last night. Not the original 1960s TV show Dad’s Army, but the remake, in the cinema at Aldeburgh, a place where but for the cappuccino machine Captain Mainwearing and the rest of the characters would have been totally at home. Like all remakes, it was. And it left me thinking ‘why did they bother?’

OK, the story so far. Loose end. Friend who has no intention of going to see it confirms she has no intention of going to see it. Have had dinner, don’t particularly want to go to the pub on my own and unlike 13 Minutes which I had wanted to go to see which was on for one single day last year, Dad’s Army seems to be on for most of February at this cinema. Which I’m sure has nothing whatsoever to do with Bill Nighy living just down the road. Nothing wrong with Bill Nighy, who is totally fine unless you do the “OMG, You’re…. you’re BILL NIGHY!” which I can see might get a bit wearing after the first 100 times. As he said, it took him a long time to become an overnight success. So flicks, anyway.

So to the story such as it is. It’s 1944 and all threat of invasion of England has passed. Threat of invading Europe is however, looming, so a German spy in the trimly ‘definitely would’ shape of Catherine Zeta Jones mit no discernable Cherman exent but with quite a determined cut to her not-yet sagging chin which I presumed was meant to make her look ruthless and foreign. She inconspicuously carries an alligator-skin suitcase carrying an Enigma machine, with a chrome-plated Luger strapped into the lid. Posing as a freelance writer but wearing conspicuously better clothes than mine, allowing the camera to close-up rather caddishly on her arse more than once by accident, she arrives in Walmington-on-Sea to find out about the huge army camp poised to launch its soldiers and tanks into France on June 6th. Charming the entire platoon, as well she might and universally loathed by every female character, she accompanies the Home Guard as they go on patrol. Corporal Jones falls over a cliff, the platoon find a chain to use to rescue him and find that it’s been securing the line of inflatable Sherman tanks that CZJ is delighted to find are decoys, put there to fool Hitler into thinking the real invasion isn’t going to be in Normandy but in the Pas de Calais.

A U-boat arrives to pick her up, Captain Mainwearing’s men are pinned down by machinegun fire from the landing party and just when things look bleakest, the female ATS arrive to provide flanking fire, distracting the Germans while spivvy Walker drives his lorry at the German’s boat. CZJ having shrewdly changed into slacks although sadly out of shot swims for it, the Boche are routed, Walker becomes a hero and Pike discovers he’s not a boy any more. The end. Go home. Nobody snored.

I even laughed twice, but it was nothing like the original. I think one of the problems was spinning a half-hour plot out over two hours. Captain Mainwearing’s wife appeared as the leader of the ATS, but there was still nothing much she could do to pad-out the extra time.

There were, as someone who has spent probably altogether too much time studying things German over the past two years, some idiosyncracies that distracted. The chrome-plated pistol, for a start. Quite why the landing party would have brought a machine-gun with them when they were just there to pick up Catherine Zeta Jones. Why they would have surfaced in broad daylight inshore, other than ‘because we can’t film it at night’ although if they had they wouldn’t have needed the U-boat CGI as much. CGI, for a much more irritating thing. It never, ever looks real for the simple reason that it isn’t. The Enigma machine couldn’t have transmitted anything because it was a coding machine, not a transmitter and no spy-master in his right mind would have sent one to England anyway.

But more, the appeal of quaint old streets that looked the way things did in 1944 pales a bit when you actually live in a place that looks that way anyway. The narrow Georgian High Street of Walmington wasn’t that much different from Woodbridge in any sense that matters except I’ve never seen Catherine Zeta Jones’s tweed-tailored rear end in the Thoroughfare or for that matter sadly any other part of her. Nobody, CZJ, the platoon, the landing party, or Pike and his girlfriend would have been rolling around in the sand on the beach because it would have been covered in barbed wire. Even going to the beach would have been suspicious. Surviving a paddle in itself would have been suspect because it would show that you knew where the mines were, the same ones that blew a 16 year-old Ken Russel’s girlfriend to pieces when he and she went for a romantic stroll in the dunes. Didn’t know why his films were a bit odd? Now you do.

Is it a bad film? Well, no. It has its moments and like all institutions, it self-references. Much in the way that when you go to see Shakespeare you used to be expected to roll around clutching your ribs and hyperventilating with hope-the-neighbours-can-hear-it laughter whenever anyone says ‘will’ (as in ‘our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills be gardeners,’ geddit? Oh for heavens sake, bodies, gardens, yes? Productive. Therefore wills being gardeners, we can shape our wills, change things by doing, and at the same time one’s will is your actual, well, you know. Look, I’ll show you later, after dinner. Now shush or you’ll miss the next bit. Oh don’t be like that.)

And Dad’s Army: The Movie has its mutedly OMG moments. The inflatable dummy decoy tanks floating into the air – well, we know about that here, because I can show you where some were actually tethered, near Parham. The cleansing fire scouring the Nazi hordes from our shores for another, here where we will never, ever know what really happened at Shingle Street. The time Sergeant Wilson calls Pike his son by accident, for example. It just slipped out. But not fnarr fnarr, obviously, because Dad’s Army wasn’t like that. Although this one was, in part. Corporal Jones rolling around on a sofa with his hand stuck down someone’s blouse was a moment that I didn’t really want to see. Yes, I know he’s supposed to be this great character actor, but just no. And not Catherine Zeta Jones. Just don’t be STUPID, ok?

Mrs Pike claiming that her roly-poly would knock CZJ’s roly-poly into a cocked hat was a moment that wouldn’t have been in the TV show either. Nor the forced ‘you just slipped her a sausage’ that was crow-barred into the script presumably when someone thought they were doing one of the last, desperate Carry On films. The doom-laden hypocrite Fraser wasn’t anything near Fraser enough and Pike, despite the real actor who’d played him appearing in another role, wasn’t Pike enough, although Godfrey was and Mainwearing near as makes no difference. Walker, the spivvy chancer oddly was a much more convincingly rounded Walker character than in the original.

But CGI. Look, I understand. You can’t find three Spitfires very easily these days although I do know where you can get two P-51 Mustangs and a Spitfire, if you ever need them. Nor a U-Boat in one piece. But it doesn’t work. The colours are always just that little bit not right, but more than that, the movement isn’t. Yes, I’m sure it’s very difficult, but so was Tom & Jerry and they didn’t pretend to be real.

It couldn’t be the original, not least because most of them are dead. The writer did Paddington and Mr Bean films. I’ve never seen either. If I wanted to watch Mr Bean I’d a) be seven years old and b) go and watch Keaton doing it better and without the ludicrous gurning. Am I slating it? No, not really. It was alright. I just don’t think it’s going to be re-run every month for the next 50 years though, somehow.

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Alternative meditation

Men used to do this every day. Almost all men, and almost every day, unless they were rich enough to have someone do it for them. It took then, as it does now, fifteen to twenty minutes to do it properly so that it’s satisfying, a couple of minutes if its rushed, when it’s not.

Shaving, obviously. The proper way, with a real razor, instead of a pencil sharpener on a stick of plastic and a stupid big price tag.

About ten years ago I got my first straight razor. It is not called a cut-throat razor unless you know nothing about it at all. I’d be prepared to put money on betting that nobody called it that until the Gillette company started advertising. I blame the war. TYhe first one. Before that, everyone shaved like a grown-up.

And it takes time. You need to prepare your face for a start, with a hot flannel draped on it, then ideally a wash with glycerine soap (practically free in Spanish supermarkets, silly money here), then rinse, then more glycerine soap and lather up with shaving soap and a brush. If you’re being really picky you could do this in a warmed bowl, but the palm of your hand will do, as it does for so many things.

You deserve it. Really.
You deserve it. Really.

Obviously you need the razor sharp. The worst cuts come from a blunt razor. Seriously. It’ll stick, or you’ll pause, or god help you, press down and before you can feel it you’ll see the red krovvi seeping through the soap, if not dripping on the cobbles. Just a tip – never move the blade along its own line. Always move it at 90 degrees to the line of the blade. Or you will slice straight into your face and even a blunt razor will go way deep before you know what’s happening. I still have a white line on my chin from doing exactly that, years ago. I can see it but no-one else has ever noticed it. That’s what clean cuts scar like.

So why do it? History, maybe, a little. Every man used to, until in the First World War Gillette got a major contract to supply the US Army. Suddenly, one and a half million men had to shave with a safety razor. Which isn’t. The whole reason I switched was I always cut myself every morning with a safety razor. It’s safe, after all. It says so. What could possibly go wrong?

With a four inch piece of steel you can see in the mirror and feel sliding over your face, you concentrate. It wakes you up like nothing else. Whether it’s the concentration, the awareness of what can go wrong, the need to sharpen the blade by stropping it on a leather belt or a towel every time you use it or just the fact that you’re spending a quarter of an hour just on you, giving yourself your full attention in a way that you rarely maybe do, it sets you up for the day. You can say your doing your bit for conservation, because you’ll never be throwing this blade away. You’ll be saving a ton of money over your lifetime, despite the fact that a decent Dovo blade will cost you about £80. But more than anything, you’re giving yourself the time you deserve. Life is short. Too short not to take good care of yourself.

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Taking time

I used to stop watches. I thought I did, anyway. When I was a child the succession of small Timexes all did the same thing. They stopped.

A month, at most. For reasons too tedious to go into again, they never got sent back to the shop, now I suspect because that would haev meant explaining where the shop was, and more relevantly, in which drawer in whose house and why the receipt was. This is the kind of stuff you deal with when your father runs two parallel households without having the balls to explain to either one of them that’s what he’s doing.

Why is this relevant? Because I don’t like secrets. But I also don’t like waste, so when I was able to get some space in my head to get a watch that actually worked for more than about a month or so, I switched to mechanical watches. About ten years back I bought a Trias. They use Swiss movements and assemble them into complete watches in Germany. I wanted a watch that would last me my lifetime. That didn’t depend on a battery to go into landfill every year. Something worth having. Something sustainable that said something about the way I wanted to live.

I found it for £35 on Ebay. I didn’t believe it either. I was in Newcastle the first time a few months later and wanterd to replace the chunky studded strap and took it into a jewellers, a proper one that didn’t have to ‘send it off to the repariers, sir,” who were as interested in watches as I was. They flipped the back off it with easy practice and told me yes, it’s an ETA 2487 movement. £35? Well done! Which was nice.

But that was ten years ago and somehow I’ve forgotten to ever get it serviced so now it’s stopped. It can be fixed. That’s the whole point. A straightforward service, taking it apart, cleaning each tiny cog, oiling it with something a bit thinner than Three-In-One and it’ll be good for another ten years.

Except the service is going to cost £125 and I can get a new watch on Ebay for £85. Not with an ETA 2487 movement, admittedly. By a company associated with Brietling. Oh because I spend too much time ferreting these things out, obviously. Why do you ask?

But that’s the choice. Stick to your principles and pay more? Or do the semi-responsible thing and get another watch that’ll last ten years. Because the alternative of wearing the damnably indestructible bright yellow 16 year-old G-Shock on my wrist now isn’t really an all-occasions option. Baby.

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The lost time

I nearly died once. Actually, that’s not true. I nearly died quite a few times. The time I crashed a motorcycle, the time I walked into the middle of an Israeli Defence Forces ambush – and don’t even start me on the bullshit behind that name – or the time I jumped onto some railway tracks to rescue someone. Or the more fundamentally stupid time I jumped onto Tube tracks to rescue my hat. Or the time a friend and I got a lift in what we still call the Blue Mazda Truck, whose driver steered up Limpley Stoke hill st 70mph, steering with his knees while he rolled a cigarette, laughing to himself.

Or the time I actually saw a bullet ricocheting towards me and somehow in that slowtime of big accidents skewing how time goes had the time to reason that if I could see it then it was heading toward me and moved and heard it spin through the air by my ear. Ok, that one probably wouldn’t have killed me. It probably wouldn’t have done my eye much good either.

Stuff, you know? Stuff. Everyone has stuff. It’s what you have.

The time I nearly died for four years I was reminded about this week. Someone I sort of know a bit on Facebook (as in we’ve PM chatted but not met) broke a leg in a minor accident. All well. She didn’t fall outside and get left in the snow or drowned in the floods or anything like that. She posted pictures of her cast and what a bore and never mind.

The next thing she knew was the elephant sitting on her chest. Or that’s how she described pulmonary thrombosis, the result of a deep vein thrombosis springing itself loose and going on a wander around your body. The “get well soon”s and “have a glass of wine and sit down” didn’t seem to cover it.

Having a glass of wine is good way of killing yourself if you’re on warfarin, probably the most common emergency anti-coagulant. Except it’s not. A good way of killing yourself would involve things being quick and painless and clean, rather than the long-term cold and pain and messily massive haemorrhaging that screwing-up with your warfarin dose usually brings.

I knew about deep vein thromboses because I had five of them. They took four years out of my life thanks to a series of doctors at Leiston surgery in Suffolk who refused point blank to do a blood test that would have cost about 80p, let alone refer me for a scan. Which would have told them exactly what I told them: I was doing a lot of long haul flights. I’d had the word thrombosis in my head since I was fourteen. I don’t know why. Nobody in my family had had one.

I kept getting sudden skewering pain that dropped me to my knees and five minutes later I was fine. Except I wasn’t. For some reason I couldn’t fathom I’d often, or if not often then regularly vomit for no reason I could see, but associated with the stabbing pain attacks. I felt cold all the time. My pelvis ached and I didn’t want to move. I felt colder and older and slower and sadder, feeling that I was dying. For the simple reason that I was.

DVT is massively serious. Your blood stops flowing. It clots because it’s not flowing. That’s bad enough. If the clot breaks away from where it formed it goes first to your lungs, where apart from being excruciatingly painful it can kill you. If it moves on from there it will go to your heart. Quite often it goes through your heart but gets stuck the other side, so your heart will be happily and very soon unhappily pumping blood into a blocked artery until it literally bursts or gives up wasting its time. If that doesn’t happen your clot will continue its way to your brain and block a blood vessel there, which means if you survive that you might have to learn how to talk again and eat with a plastic spoon. You might want to have a think about whether you actually do want to survive and do all that again. And leave some written instructions for your next of kin, somewhere they can find it in a hurry.

There is nothing good about DVT. In the same way there is nothing good about a Suffolk health service which refuses to even acknowledge DVT as an issue. It should be obvious to anyone that someone with a broken leg is a major DVT risk candidate. In France they’d get an anti-coagulant jab as a precaution. But not here. That would cost about £2 a day. Far cheaper to wait until you have a proper bill for treating a pulmonary embolism. Or the person just quietly dies and stops bothering the doctor, the way the government and some clinicians would apparently prefer.

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Waiting for Spring

It sounds bucolic. Something that should grace the pages of The Countryman. Accompanied by a picture of daffodils bravely poking their tender heads above the snow, and maybe a quotation from Wordsworth as well, something symbolising hope and renewal.

Except this time of year doesn’t feel like that yet. It would be stupid to say the whole world reeled over the past few weeks when one by one, the musical figures I grew up with simply died; if you’re trying not to get ebola or hoping your house doesn’t get bombed again in Syria then you probably, I concede, have more to worry about than whether there really is a starman waiting in the sky who’d like to come and see us, or whether that weird light and unearthly sound is just an F-14’s afterburner kicking in.

But they still died, one after the other. Bowie, Rickman, Mott the Hoople’s drummer, the guy who played guitar in The Eagles. I’m not going to do the whole “their loss means” blah. I know it doesn’t mean much in the whole scheme of things, but then again, what does? I’m now a better guitarist than the guy in the Eagles and my guitar playing isn’t great. I’m a better drummer than that guy in Mott the Hoople and I don’t play the drums at all. But I could try. And he can’t anymore.

 

But I’m not extending this line of thought to David Bowie. He was special. I don’t know whether he was special because he was the perfect pop-star, the one guaranteed to get your parents howling with confused rage. It can’t be just that. We had a long queue of pop-stars who could do that, from Alice Cooper to Noddy Holder, Marc Bolan and in my house at least, ELO. They particularly enraged my mother because, listening to just the start of Rockaria, it was clear they knew something about music. But then they just had to spoil it, didn’t they, with that thump thump thump. Ian Hunter’s habit of nicking bits of Debussy and anything else that was out of copyright went down much the same way.

I can’t say anything about David Bowie. I mean I won’t. Because it hurts. I stopped listening to his stuff after Ashes to Ashes. I listened to when it first came out, my first term at Bath eating breakfast in a warm new house in frosty Larkhall before I rode my Triumph up the hill to the university. I came back again with Heathen, then stopped again until what I still call last year, in 2013. Oh because I’m old and senile, alright? Happy now?

The Next Day album (see above – it’s what we call it at my age) quietly stood every other song broadcast on its head, asking Where Are We Now? of a world that had learned to pretend that identikit boy dancers were musicians and synchronised strippers were empowered businesswomen leveraging their assets.

And now Lazarus. And it’s still a lie. David Bowie is not going to rise from the dead. I can’t even bear to listen to this too much, or to be honest, most of his other stuff. Not right now.

This, a film of a man dying written and produced and directed by a man dying, along with a big percentage of our hopes and alternative dreams, our fantasy of jumping up on the stage to sing the songs of darkness and dismay, or at least mine until I did it a couple of times and found another world there and not the one I’d quite expected, this is too much right now.