High on a hill

There is a green hill far away. We sang about it in Sunday school, but it’s more true now then when I first sang it, back where all the hills were green and not far away at all, just a cycle ride away.

I wrote this today about something over a year ago. I don’t know if it works or not. I thought it did when I wrote it.

This is the place I grew up, the place I'm from, this land of green hills far away. But somehow, very close to me all the time. — This is the place I grew up, the place I’m from, this land of green hills far away. But somehow very close to me all the time.

High On a Green Hill

I met her in a pub when we were younger

Half our lives away; I met her on Facebook when she was ill.

I gave her a book of mine to read, while she lay

Under a blanket in the chill of an Andalucian winter,

Thick patterned wool around her thin shoulders,

Cold tiles under her long feet. She had a plan

To start a marmalade factory but something happened

To the farmers collective or the orange crop,

I didn’t really know.

And then there was the husband

And then there was the son and it was complicated,

You know how it goes sometimes.

I thought of her all that winter, pale and cold

Her light burning lower.

You can die when you’re our age.

Or anytime, it’s just we know that now.

She had pneumonia, she had blood tests,

She thought she had something else and

We shared the great day when she could walk in the sun

Three clicks to the village and rest and back again

On her own, by email, the way people do now.

After the marmalada corporation somehow didn’t happen

We met face-to-face the second time in our lives;

A university reunion.

She was the only reason I wanted to go.

She didn’t drink any more.

I was about ten years too late for that plan

But I didn’t know that when I offered her a glass of wine

And as she said “if I drink I have no limits,”

As I tried so hard to catch the waiter’s eye

For a whole bottle her friend kicked my leg under the table,

Hard and then harder until she said

“And this time I’ll probably die, so no,

I won’t have a drink. Thanks.”

She drank fizzy water.

Apparently there are different tastes,

Just not the ones I thought she meant.

We ate while I tried to hide the tinted sin of my glass

And talked and went quite early to our separate rooms.

When someone doesn’t drink, what else do you do?

But in the morning, fresh, we walked through sacred damp Bath

To the café I’d found that I thought she might like.

And she did. And I did, when the waitress assumed

She was my wife. It felt like it could have gone that way,

In a different life. After breakfast we walked along the canal,

Early Spring and suddenly it’s May and maybe,

Just maybe everything would turn out ok and

After she told me where she’d been and I didn’t need

Or even want to top her stories and win,

Because just walking there with her,

It felt as if I had for once,

As if I’d already won,

Although what that was

I didn’t really know.

She played electric bass and me, I played

A bit of guitar and sax.

Our first gig was outside the city, later.

I thought I’d need to drink but somehow I didn’t.

In the shadow of a church up there on the hill,

In the mist outside the pub door.

I didn’t finish my drink, blowing warm

If not hot and maybe close to cool.

She was taking a taxi to the airport at four.

After we’d all judged the gig a total success

And packed away our rocknroll music stands,

Our funky bifocal reading glasses,

She zipped her Hofner into its flight case

As I said don’t call it, I’ll drive you there

And she said ok. We both knew

It wasn’t really the right direction

But part of her wanted to stay.

A little bit. Just a little bit.

We bought factory-made hummus

Second-hand in a Sunday supermarket,

Some grapes and bread on its sell-by date,

Flavoured water I’d never drunk,

Something with a hint of lime and ate

Parked on a grass verge in my car,

High on a green hill in the sluicing rain,

Next to a stone barn grey against the black sky,

The food unimportant until it was time

For her to catch her plane, nearly,

Or anyway drive her to the airport.

We parked again and haggled again

Over petrol money I didn’t want from her,

Paid the car park, carried her bags

Then watched her smoke a cigarette outside.

Before we hung around Departures

Until it really was time for her to go.

We’ll do it again some time.

All of us, maybe. Sooner than before

We’ll be high on a green hill again.

That is the way it is in the mountains

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The best way to find out if you can trust anybody is to trust them.

All you have to do is write a true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

The first draft of anything is shit.

This isn’t my stuff, you know.

These are Hemingway quotes. And maybe like a lot of people, he’s been one of those writers you sort of know for so long that you can’t decide if he’s any good or not.

Fiesta

I read Fiesta when I was about twenty-four, only a bit younger than the character with the mysterious wound would probably have been, if it was set in the 1920s and he’d got shot wherever he’d got shot (Vimy Ridge, if you’ll pardon the expression?) in the Great War. Just to clarify, it was alternatively titled The Sun Also Rises, about a man who keeps coming across some English posh totty in Paris. Except he can’t seem to actually do that. And she isn’t sure she wants him to either, but she’s also not really sure she doesn’t and they sort of go on holiday with their friends except she’s not really with him you know, you do know that, I mean we had this talk, didn’t we? We said. And all the usual blah that anyone in their early twenties who drinks too much in a city can relate to. I loved that book.

At school I’d found a copy of something Hemingway did about a fish and an old man, and got through something he wrote about the Italian campaign in WWI, parts of which I recycled for O Level History which as nobody else even knew there was any fighting in Italy in WWI except probably Gino Petrillo and he was in a different class made me seem particularly knowledgeable.

I liked that whisky and guns and typewriters things, the more so because I was hugely into Hunter Thompson to the extent that I tracked him to his lair in Woody Creek. Depressingly, that’s actually true, but this isn’t the time for my Hunter Thompson and me party piece. Later.

I didn’t like the fact that like Richard Brautigan who lived in the same place, like Thompson who also once lived up on the California coast, all three of them shot themselves to death coincidentally or by design. In Thompson’s case, I’d suspect by design.

But that huge big gun big life thing, I didn’t really get off on that a lot. Nor did someone I used to know. She had to write about Hemingway at university and what with drinking and shagging and all the other things to do she couldn’t quite bring herself to read about a fat old man who hated himself, or anything he’d written. The day of the exam she skimmed through the covers of a few Hemingway titles and read no more than about twenty pages, at random. And blagged it. She’d got the gist of the plot and did much the same as I did in History O Level – stuck stuff in that was tangential and vaguely relevant. Whenever she got stuck she’d introduce a “Hemingway quote.”

The inverted commas are because she made it up. She couldn’t remember any real Hemingway quotes so she made up a bullshit, sparse, macho one instead. “That is the way it is in the mountains.” Sometimes with a comma, but more often not.

You bleed, writing about a bank manager taking a long time catching a fish on holiday. You write the truest thing you know about someone cadging doughnuts in a MidWest coffeeshop. OK. That’s probably why she got hugely good marks for her paper and something of a reputation of a Hemingway scholar for the rest of the term.

That is the way it is, in the mountains.

Guns, bombs and toilet bowls

A teacher in America was shot by her own gun when she went to the loo, according to the BBC. But the BBC isn’t what it used to be when Val and John and Bill & Ben ruled the airwaves. Right at the end of the tabloid story the BBC says basically, everything you just read was bullshit. We made it up. Yes, there was a teacher. Yes, she had a gun and went to the loo, or as she was American, the bayathrum. Yes, the gun went off when she didn’t mean it to. But it didn’t shoot her. It shot the toilet bowl. That’s what put her in hospital.

If that sounds unlikely, believe. And I know, because I was that soldier. Well, if not that soldier, certainly another toilet bowl victim.

And Scalextrix

It didn't have all that fancy digital stuff when I were a lad. — It didn’t have all that fancy digital stuff when I were a lad.

It was all a long time ago. I was living in London and had a job I hated and I’d been to some business exhibition down in Earls Court or somewhere. They were interchangeable. The only reason anyone went was because they had to and in those days they were full of free drinks. Maybe they still are.

Apart from alcohol one of the stalls had a Scalextrix track. If you don’t know it, it was plastic track with metal strips in that carried 12 volt current that worked electric racing cars, until they usually spun across the room on the corners because you’d been going too fast down the straight. Eeeh, we had proper toys in them days. Every male child was obliged by law to own a set, even though nobody really knew whether you pronounced the first X or not. The deal on the stall was simple. Win the race, win a bottle of champagne. With the cunning of the truly drunk I remembered the tortoise and the hare. Thinking that you’d lose more time retrieving the car and putting it back on the track if it spun off I just drove it sedately around the track. Which worked. Free champagne. Result. All I needed was someone negotiable to drink it with and there was one of those at home so I put the bottle in the big inside pocket of my covert coat and got the Tube.

Back then Finsbury Park overground had loos. It didn’t for a while after this episode, when the IRA blew it up. That stuff happened then, too. A friend walked past Liberty’s a few minutes before the windows blew out. I was close enough to hear the bang and see the smoke from somewhere in Fulham that was blown up. I thought the IRA blew up the loos anyway.

Pretty much like the Finsbury Park station Gents.

I was a bit tired. I was so tired I had to lean my head on the cool, welcoming wall tiles while I used the loo and without boasting or anything, they were quite a way away. I closed my eyes, because I was really, no I mean really tired. And the tiles were cool on my forehead even though I had to bend a bit to get my head on the wall and I wasn’t needing to find a bathroom really quite quickly anymore and I had free champagne and everything was really quite ok when the whole bathroom exploded.

There was a huge bang and I heard stuff pinging and ricochet off the walls just like on Saving Private Ryan and things hit me in the leg and my feet were wet with blood. Except when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see any blood and so far as I could make out the walls of the bathroom were still intact and there wasn’t any smoke and it wasn’t making any sense. Then I saw the champagne bottle in the stub of porcelain sticking out of the floor and suddenly it did. I didn’t mean for the bottle to fall out of my pocket and blow up the toilet bowl, but life is full of unintended things. Or it was then, anyway, but the bottle was intact so I went home and drank it.

Again according to the BBC another American professor shot himself in the foot when he was fiddling with his gun in his pocket while he was supposed to be talking to people. I had to flail desperately at my own trousers once when a Susy Lamplugh rape alarm went off in my pocket and I couldn’t turn it off while I was on the phone.

It was the ’80s. That’s what happened in offices. I’d been to a Lamplugh Trust event the night before and got one of the aerosol-powered alarms mainly because it was free but also because I liked stuff like that (wanna see my baton, baby?) and because I was a bit bored I was fiddling with the alarm in my pocket while I was talking to someone on the phone when it went off. Luckily it didn’t shoot a hole in my foot or explode a toilet bowl. That all came later. We all drank too much and had unprotected sex and bought flats we couldn’t afford with money we didn’t have for the price of a deposit on one now. It was brilliant. We had a BBC we could believe in, too. Mostly.

Selling England

There used to be a song called Selling England By The Pound. I think, although obviously I’m too young to know, that inter alia it was about devaluation, the scheme Harold Wilson came up with in the 1960s, artificially lowering the foreign exchange value of sterling to make exports cheaper in the countries they were supposed to be exported to. Since the great days of selling cheap Birmingham crap to natives in Africa, British overseas trade had depended on being cheap, the cheaper the better.

I don’t know whether it was because it was difficult to get investment money for new equipment, or the fact that if you mechanise first you’re stuck with the oldest machinery while everyone else is buying the newer stuff, a sense that if it’s not bust don’t fix it or as a country we’ve never, in my experience, valued real skills.

Sure, we had a couple of films about the man who invented the Spitfire. Anyone remember his name? Or his colostomy bag? The man who invented radar then? Or the hovercraft? Henry Hudson, the railway king? Any general other then Butcher Haig, or RAF officer other than Bomber Harris, or any naval officer after Nelson, really? Dyson. We know him. He moved his factory from Betjeman’s Malmesbury to China. Because it was cheaper, obviously.

Riding the rails

I knew a girl once whose great grandfather was a railway engineer. He designed steam engines, some of his in their time quite literally the fastest things on earth. I had another friend whose grandfather had driven the same engines. They never met. The first one, with her double-barrelled name and her genuine Hon. title put me right when I talked about the nobility of doing real jobs, of being covered in coal dust and sweat, understanding and cajoling these pulsing machines.

“No, he despised people like that,” she told me. Designing these things was a huge mental challenge. Rarely hard work. Just don’t ask him to bother about the grimy proles who had to work the things.

And then we had a war that got millions of grimy proles so fed-up with being asked to die for something they weren’t a part of that they voted Churchill, the nation’s saviour, into oblivion. Then we had Peter Sellers playing the archetypal trades unionist Fred Kite,

Fred Kite, the trades unionist. He looks like Hitler, doesn't he? Geddit? — Fred Kite, the trades unionist. He looks like Hitler, doesn’t he? Geddit?

or we were told we did, and then a Prime Minister the swooning papers called SuperMac, as if we ever really needed reminding who was in charge when things were real. The Americans had JFK. We got the landed-gentry First World War officer with his massive shooting estate and TV sketch moustache, then the equally fatuous double act, Wilson and Benn.

So far as Benn was concerned it was never really the end of the peer show; he renounced the title to get into the Commons, but obviously kept the money that went with it. Equally obviously, his son is in Parliament now. As for Wilson, the man who famously sported a pipe when there were cameras about and a cigar when they weren’t, the man who was either so stupid or such a brazen liar that he couldn’t see anything wrong with going on TV one week to announce that devaluation would not affect “the pound in your pocket” and then the very next week, just before Simon Dee, going back on the telly to say actually, thinking about it, it would.

Unlike Simon Dee Harold Wilson wasn’t accompanied by a white E-type Jaguar and a mini-skirted dolly bird; he’d obviously had very, very bad PR advice about that. It would probably have been easier for people to hear the real message if it went along the lines of “I’ve pissed it all up the wall on fast cars and easy chicks, yes, me, personally,” instead of the truth: “Either I’m stupid or I think you are.”

Is it relevant now? It’s nearly all sold, after all. Just a few bits of the NHS left and the rail network, but that’s so crap that the taxpayer has to pay for that so that modern rail barons aren’t burdened with any of the bad bits of privatisation, like social investment, or common responsibility. But the same song still sings out: The health service is safe with us. We must defend our interests, whatever they are, however often they change. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the House of Saud. Immigrants are bad. People on benefits crashed the economy. It was Labour’s fault.

As before the real message stays the same: “Either I’m stupid or I think you are.” And while people don’t vote it doesn’t really matter which one of those is true.

Black horse, white horse and a Sunbeam Rapier.

I went to the FolkEast festival last weekend, not least because it was walking distance from my house. I haven’t been to a festival for years, and more fool me. One of the first acts I saw there was Lisa Knapp, who had a four piece band behind her and she was sublime. I went and bought her CD from the information tent as soon as her set was over.

13LisaKnapp1 — Lisa Knapp. What’s not to like?

If you haven’t heard her, she sounds like this. And looks like this. She’s got a powerful voice, a little bit Kate Bush, a little bit Bjork, but newer, more now somehow and much as it pains me to say it, I think she’s actually better than Kate. If the entire music thing hadn’t gone fractal I’d have said she’d be bigger than Kate Bush in a year or two, but I’m not sure that’s how things work these days.

What I particularly like about her stuff is the way she explores a dark side of music, or life, or folk tales. Years ago I read about a man who went to get the papers one morning and found, rather to his surprise, a woman in what he presumed to be a shroud, dancing a few inches above the pavement in a perfectly ordinary street of terraced houses. She was still there when he came back from the shop, avoiding her side of the road, so he didn’t go that way again. And you hear these stories and think why? Why would anyone make that up? What would they do that for, exactly, if they didn’t want to get sectioned?

So when I heard Lisa Knapp singing Black Horse I was surprised by the power of her voice but also by the darkness she was flirting with, so much so that she turns a conversation/analogy between Life and Death, darkness and light into a lullaby. You can see it here. I watched it half an hour ago and I’ve still got chills running up my back because of something someone once told me.

I bought a car once from a friend’s girlfriend’s grandfather. It was an old car but he hadn’t exactly run this Mk V Sunbeam Rapier into the ground. He was out driving one night, with his wife, when just like an old joke, someone ran past him. Which was odd but fine in and of itself, expect he was doing about 60 mph and the man ran straight past the car in the same direction. Then it got odder, because the man flipped around and started running backwards, staring into the car as he ran a couple of feet in front of the bonnet. The old man braked, as well you might, but not in time or at least what he thought was time, because the man ran through the car. He could see him as he came through the dashboard, through the gap between the seats and out of the back of the car. The old man drove to the next town and found a police station to tell them what happened. They said it had happened before, there.

And again, why would you make that up? What would possess anyone to make that up and go to the police to tell them about it? I have no idea, whether it’s true, why anyone would make it up or any of it. But Lisa Knapp singing Black Horse in her video took me right back there to the day I heard that story and reminded me how I felt, driving that car at night. Nothing happened. How could it?

Customer Service

It’s BT. Obviously

“Thank-you for holding. We are very busy at the moment and your call will be answered as soon as possible.”

I don’t have a choice. I have to hold. I don’t need thanks for it. It’s pointless. I have no option. I can’t phone anyone else about this. And after waiting 24 hours for a call back to explain what I have to do to fix your fault, thanks don’t come into it.

It’s BT. I have no broadband. It’s been patchy but I’ve been told well, you live in Suffolk, what do you expect? Same as mobile phones. Let’s face it; it’s all retirees, the kind of people who make their own wooden folding chairs to go to the Snape Poetry Prom. Do you think they give a shit about no broadband? Only once a year, when the Saga car insurance comes due.

I am clearly not very busy, because I am expected to sympathise with the other, better people who are. You can tell they’re better. They’re busy. They’ve not sitting around complaining about things, shirking. They’re getting on, busily, with their tidy hair and their clean white shirts. Not like the slackers and shirkers and Moaning Minnies who frankly are just a drain on things with all their negative attitudes, as customer service may as well be called now.

So far it’s taken one entire day for my call to be answered. When I ask why this is, or what BT intend to do about it, I’m simply put in another queue, the one for people who ask difficult and therefore stupid questions. Like, why did I have to wait a day for a callback? Why when I re-structured my day to be at the house (essential according to BT) between 5pm and 6pm, notified to me by three separate texts and not really that convenient, especially considering I phoned at 20:00 the day before) was there, how shall we say, no phone call at all?

Why, given it’s obviously possible to answer my call at once if you had enough staff and gave a shit, wasn’t it answered for over half an hour? Why, BT, don’t you know how English works? Why when you were privatised in what, 1986 or something, and people have been born, had children and died in that time, when privatising your useless service was supposed to increase competition, as every parliamentarian will swear on a stack of Bibles, is it next to impossible to get any broadband connection that doesn’t use your useless service? Why?

Here’s what happened.

Dear BT, I realise you don’t give a shit about it because last time I mentioned it you put me on hold until my mobile battery ran out, but I’ll tell you anyway.

Yesterday I had to do something online. Quite an important thing, because I’d said I would so I had to. But no Internet. I phoned BT to see if there was anything wrong with the line. Everyone here knows you get slower Internet when it rains but BT say you don’t so that’s that and you’re a liar, but this wasn’t slow, it was not happening. BT, or the irritating Scottish voice BT thinks calms people down who wouldn’t have needed calming down if BT’s shit monopoly service wasn’t so utterly shit, told me there was nothing wrong with the line. Oddly, for a Scottish voice, it didn’t say ‘pal,’ when it told me there wisnae anything wrang, but if youse keep on there med well be.

So I got in the car and drove half an hour to go and buy a new modem. The old one was at least eight years old and I measured that by moving houses, so it might have been older. There’s nothing in a modem I can see how it could break, exactly, but maybe it just gets bored, or there’s a flesh tone counter or something. So anyway. New modem. It probably wasn’t BT’s fault that when I left Staples and got into the car and turned the key it just went click so I had to read Angela’s Ashes (really, hasn’t this all been done a bit, you know, before? Really? Sure and Catholicly begorrah it’s the drink and the rain to be sure and the past is another country and besoides, the pig was dead?) for two hours while Ipswich’s finest sashayed out to get chips and come back again until the AA turned up to sell me a new car battery, one of those things guv, that’s how it goes.

Get home. Install new modem. Still nothing. Phone BT. It’s not the line. It’s the exchange. We’ll call you. Tomorrow, when it would suit you. You can stay in all day or we can call you in the evening, let’s say five o’clock. So let’s say that indeed. Cycle to Aldeburgh. Buy a book and cheese and bread and tomatoes and lie on the beach in the sun for three hours, dozing and reading and then interrupt what has been a fairly lovely Saturday so far to get back for BT. But it’s hot and I’m thirsty so maybe as I’m literally cycling past the door anyway time to drop into a friend’s pub where there’s been perhaps the teensiest misunderstanding this morning but that’s nothing to do with BT to have a pint of wheat beer, but my army friend is there with his mother, so three pints down before I’m told it makes my other friend, the not army one who runs the place, feel ‘a bit weird’ if I’m there as a customer so would I mind not being, call you later, let’s go out after the lunch service tomorrow. Get home.

Nothing on the mobile. Nothing on the landline. Phone BT. Same message. Hang on for forty minutes until I eventually get through to someone. Who asks all of the questions I’ve dutifully tapped into the set of menus I needed to go through to get to talk to her, then can’t answer the question I want answering, when BT are going to sort this out and why after 28 years is their service still so utterly shit and there isn’t any competition? I’d settle for just the answer to the first one, to be honest, but of course, she doesn’t know. It’s not her job to know. I don’t know what her job is, but it isn’t to help customers. Because she can’t. It’s not her fault. She’s got no way of helping the customers. That’s why it can’t be any part of her job specification. What her job seems to be is winding up customers who are stupid enough to pay BT to phone BT to complain about BT so that they pay BT more to stay on the line having more things to complain about BT to BT about.

BT’s service, to use a technical term, is a pile of shit. And because this is a free market and nothing to do with the government, and because it’s such a free market that every single broadband provider in the UK has to use BT’s lines unless they live in Hull, tough. See above.

Dear Ebay

Please, if you’re going to email me in English, please learn to speak it in a way that doesn’t patronise me and tell lies at the same time. Thank-you.

No, this simply is not true. I made EBay aware of at least six fake ‘dovo’ razors. They were all still there for sale.

I also do not understand how you/Ebay can pretend my listing was removed “for my own safety.” What danger was I in, exactly?

My lack of understanding is this: Why is it ok to list fake razors? Why won’t EBay ever do anything about removing and banning sellers who repeatedly list fake razors?

I am sick and tired of Ebay’s sanctimonious and hypocritical attitude. Look at this listing

Click to view larger image and other views

Have one to sell? Sell it yourself

Cut Throat Razor Damascus Steel Jeffery Straight Grooming Vintage west Todd dovo

It is totally fake. The same way it was fake yesterday, the same way it was fake when I first reported it. Ebay refuses to do anything about it. The word dovo is listed clearly.

Dovo is a registered company in Germany. Every single one of their blades has the word DOVO stamped on it. This does not. This means it has nothing to do with the DOVO factory. This listing is fake. This seller sells fakes. Every one of his razors that says ‘dovo‘ in the ad is an ad for a fake. And I have told you this, by email, repeatedly.

WHY WON’T EBAY DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?

I don’t expect a real answer because Ebay can do no wrong in its own eyes. I have been scammed out of money by fake buyers and Ebay’s attitude is simply a) I have to sort it out myself (b) tough.

Get these fake razors off eBay. Get the fake seller off Ebay for good, as he never sells anything else. Until then, please do not lecture me about my safety.

Best regards and my eternal hatred,

Me.

And I’m not even going to bother mentioning the fake ‘damascus’ steel which a pound to a penny is just rubbish metal etched with acid, not fine metal folded, hammered, folded and hammered hundreds of times so the edge when it’s sharpened is a sharks’ mouth of tiny ridges of steel. For #29. Sure it is, eBay. Sure it is.

That place

I used to drive around a lot, just for fun. There wasn’t much else to do where I grew up; everywhere was somewhere else. As I got older I kept on driving for fun, or if not fun then more often to be somewhere I wasn’t.

I bought a house in the Cotswolds one winter, a place I’d driven through when I was eighteen and not that far from where I was born, but we left there when I was two. The real town I bought the old posting barn, four hundred years old, where footsteps often carried on from the old pub next door straight through where the wall was, six feet thick, and walked through the barn, and still the house I was happy walking around at three in the morning, can’t sleep, leaving the lights off to see the sleeping town was in Not Your Heart Away, the place where Ben and Claire, Peter and Liz stopped after the car crash they’d just escaped having.

But none of that ever happened. Things like it did, but that didn’t, because they were imaginary people. Almost. Just like that place.

That Place

That place we saw once

Driving that bright January day;

I can’t remember the name of the town

Just bigger than a village

I don’t often drive that way now.

But somewhere on a hill,

Stark trees against the sharp blue sky

Up on the ridge, a red phone box

Against the snowy hedge,

The morning almost silent

Now the car’s calmed down.

Our eyes nearly back to normal

Once the motorway’s long behind us.

Cold with the window open.

Definitely not a day you want

To come out without a coat.

That feeling in your throat this time of year

Making you wonder if it’s the weather

Or whether you’re getting a cold

And how long it’s been since you were here before.

The shop’s become someone’s house now

And other new houses built on fields

To let you know you’re getting older,

But still alive. Still alive

As a cat walks across the frosty road

This crisp morning and you’d swear

You caught the Boxing Day fox-hunting

Smell of cigars as you turned the corner

That wasn’t quite where you remembered it was.

Wrong turn; And you drive the length

Of this Cotswold street.

A man on his phone, smiling, carrying the newspaper

Back towards his home or someone else’s.

Safe and warm for now.

If you’d lived here it would have been different.

All of it. And you know that’s true.

How different it would all have been

If I’d never known you.

Psychosis

For a day job I work for a mental health hospital. Today I read one of the descriptions of the services the hospital offers and wondered about the way the fear and stigma of mental illness has affected treatment, to the extent that it’s not the done thing to even talk about it. We can and do happily discuss mental health but it’s not really on to talk about mental illness. It’s frightening. It’s a total loss of control.

Out on the primal veldt if you break your leg the lions might get you sooner, but at least you can make a plan. Light a fire, sharpen a stick, do something to put it off. And maybe, maybe you’ll get through. But when your mind isn’t very well you’re the most vulnerable you can possibly be and still be alive. Your plan is going to be about as good as the lions’s and they’ve got much bigger teeth than you.

Watch a cat with another cat that just came back from the vet and acts woozy from the anaesthetic. That would be my fear of what would happen, that frightened people would lash out, as frightened people do. Unless you’re lucky. Unless you can get help.

The service description got me thinking of how sanitised the language of therapy has become. Maybe it’s a good thing. I honestly don’t know. In one way it helps by reminding people, maybe unintentionally, the thinness of the tightrope we all walk. I see people who’ve missed their footing every day. It’s a terrifyingly long way down.

Psychosis

Treatment for psychotic symptoms, including hearing voices and seeing things others do not, feeling paranoid or mistrustful, believing in an ability to read other people’s minds, feeling confused, irritable and depressed, not thinking clearly, feeling that bad things may happen to self or others, believing in one’s special powers or fame are classic symptoms of a psychotic episode.

The factsheet told me the symptoms are common

And extensively varied including hearing voices,

Or seeing things that other people don’t see and hear.

And it’s true. I hear voices that other people don’t.

Other people don’t share my memories

And I hear your voice still telling me it’ll be ok.

Feeling paranoid or mistrustful.

I used to think paranoid meant thinking

Everyone was out to get you

But in the end, one person’s quite enough

Especially when they don’t want to get you at all

But the opposite. They want to un-get you.

For good. And mistrust.

Where would I be without a healthy dose of that?

Signed up to share my bank account with a Nigerian prince

Who suddenly needs to get the money belonging to his uncle

Who sadly died in a plane crash out of the country.

If I’d only share my details half of it can be mine.

And I can tick another box now. I could read his mind

This prince with a distinctly un-royal address.

But maybe things are different there.

Where nobody is confused or irritable or depressed

Where everyone thinks clearly all the time,

Where the words psychosis and mental health

Or service user are hardly ever used,

Unlike American Express or bank account details.

It’s my attitude, isn’t it?

It’s all in my head, as if I could think anywhere else

And shift this feeling that bad things might happen to me

And they will without any question at all

Because nobody gets out of this alive.

Do I believe in my special powers? It depends.

Right now only my special power to survive

Unlike the tens of billions who went before me

Dying and being born, a flash and dust

Under an eternal flame

So yes. Hands up. Me sir! Me sir! Sir! Sir!

That’s my special fame.

This is not the thing I wanted to write about mental health treatment. It just came out that way. As some people seem to have problems, oops, sorry, I meant issues reading this and thinking ‘Is he?’ You know, is he like that?’ the answer is no. Not diagnosed, anyway.

Unhappening

After work, the happy volunteers gathered on top of the tower. Quite. Some nights, anyway.

Long, long ago when if not the world then at least I was young, or younger, anyway, I lived on a kibbutz. You sort of had to at my school if you’d been on the sailing team.

Yes, I know how that sounds. Thanks.

It wasn’t that posh. We had two Enterprises and two Mirrors, both types wooden dinghies that might have been made in someone’s garage and many of them were. We sailed on a lake that had been a gravel pit next to Westbury railway station. We had two teachers looking after us, both of them a bit like the kids who ended-up sailing, nice, but none of us really fitted in with the school. The female teacher had been through a divorce from another member of staff. We knew something wasn’t right when we saw the obviously not happy couple arrive at school one morning in their (probably his, in those days) Escort Mexico or whatever it was that blokes having second thoughts went and bought on HP after they’d grown a Zapata moustache. They parked and got out and kissed briefly before they each went their separate ways to their different classes.

Just as a tip, if you want to convince IIIa everything is fine and dandy in your marriage, maybe not both wipe your lips simultaneously as you turn away. It stays with me still, that symbol of a gritted teeth let’s-keep-this-civilised break-up in progress. Hanging on in quiet desperation might have been the English way once. Times were changing.

The other teacher was another misfit, one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. Someone you could trust completely. When one of the other pupils’ father keeled over dead it was this teacher who stepped in quietly as someone who was always there. You didn’t mess him about. You didn’t even want to, because he was totally fair. Unlike the other PE teacher, who was such an utter arse that he spent his lunchtime driving around the town looking through pub windows to see who was where and who shouldn’t be (some of us were eighteen and there wasn’t a school rule about not going to pubs), the sailing PE teacher was just straight down the line. He was usually smiling and quiet. I think I saw him smoking a couple of times. Certainly he didn’t bother asking stupid questions about why when the dinghies went the other side of the island they apparently all hit a headwind and huge clouds of Old Holborn rolled over the lake. At least. But then, he didn’t need to prove anything. He’d been a paratrooper in The War.

Sorry, I’ll type that again. The good PE teacher, the un-ostentatious non-arse one, the one who smiled, had been a paratrooper in the war. Not Northern Ireland Parachute Regiment beating up kids with sticks. Arnhem. D-Day. Unimaginably out in front. You don’t get much more rock than that, really. He probably gave the other one an inferiority complex just by turning up.

So anyway, as nominal Captain of the sailing team it was my sacred duty to go to kibbutz after school. After I left, you understand. It would have been too far to get back every morning, in those days.

I went out with Project 67. I went up to that London for the interview and found people with Walther PPKs stuck down their belt in an office in St Johns Wood hidden behind what looked like a brick wall and clearly wasn’t, all covered by CCTV. It wasn’t now. They only had CCTV on James Bond films back then. James Bond films and spook cover offices in St Johns Wood. It was my first taste of ‘we can do what we like.’ I got more familiar with that as the next few months rolled on. I didn’t know then that the .22 Walther PPK was a favourite Mossad tool for when words just weren’t enough.

I went out there for about two months. I was 19. It seemed a lot longer, but things do when a month is a much bigger proportion of the life you’ve had so far. Revivim was a pile of nothing in the middle of the Sinai desert. It was nothing like the catalogue of lies we’d been told to get us out there. In writing in my brochure was stuff about how you could all get together and borrow a kibbutz car and go into town. There were no kibbutz cars. ‘Town’ was Be’er Sheba, 36 km away and apart from the bar at the bus station there wasn’t anything to do there except not buy the green tobacco that looked like dope but wasn’t in the market and look at the beggars with twisted legs where they sold the live chickens. It wasn’t much like Trowbridge at all, somehow.

They saved the biggest lie for the night the kibbutz was attacked. We knew there were armed guards around every night. Because of TV we pretty much knew what a full magazine of 9mm going off sounded like, but it wasn’t a sound we’d expected to hear as we didn’t have a TV. We all stopped what we were doing and piled out of our huts to stand there illuminated in the parachute flares that were drifting down. Our PE teacher would have told us to get back inside and lie on the floor, the same way I’d tell people now, but he wasn’t there.

There wasn’t any more gunfire. Some older people from the kibbutz self-importantly turned up with Uzi sub-machine guns in their hands, rounded us up and marched us off without any explanation. What’s happening? Nothing. Where are we going? The shelter. What shelter?

Good question, as it turned out. We were all marched down some steps behind a locked steel door on the tennis court, where it turned out the brick hut wasn’t a toolshed after all, but the top of a flight of steep stairs. We all sat there for about an hour. What’s happening? Still nothing.

Eventually we were sent back to our huts. What’s happening? Nothing. Everyone wasn’t talking about it at breakfast. The volunteers were. The people who lived on the kibbutz weren’t. Even when you asked them directly.

So what happened last night?

What do you mean?

We all had to go to the shelter.

There is no shelter.

The gunfire.

There was no gunfire.

The parachute flares? The lights in the sky?

You were dreaming. Nothing happened.

After about an hour we were all sent back to bed. It’s safe. What is? Nothing.

After about two weeks someone found out what had happened. The kibbutz guards that night were fifteen years old. Apparently it was a really good idea to give fifteen year olds loaded sub-machine guns to stick in the front basket on their bicycles. It was night-time, nothing was happening because it never did unless you went spying on who was using the old huts who shouldn’t have been but hey, you’re fifteen and you’ve got an Uzi. Obviously the best thing to do is check the safety catch is on. Not by feeling it with your thumb. Not by taking your hand off the pistol-grip and making sure the web of your fingers isn’t pressing into the back of the handle. No. You’re fifteen. So you hold the thing firmly, (disengaging the grip safety) and pull the trigger. And before you can get your finger off the trigger, because who would have thought that would happen, 30 rounds of 9mm have streaked across the sky at 1200 feet per second.

But luckily, nobody thought it. Because they were kibbutz people. And kibbutz people don’t make mistakes. So luckily it never happened at all. Except it did. Just like the two Arab villages which were bulldozed to make way for the kibbutz.