My Other Stuff – Page 6 – Writer-insighter

The price you pay

Once upon a time, in a land long ago, I was at a rodeo.

No, seriously.

It was in a place called Greencastle, In., and the only way you’ll ever have heard of it is if you work for IBM, know where one of two V1 rockets in the USA are (apart from Werner von Braun’s den, obviously), or you’re an alumni of De Pauw university. Or you know something about Dillinger or the way any old bank robbery in the 1930s got attributed to the famous robbers if the actual robbers didn’t get caught and escaped in a car. Or maybe, like me, you were chasing a red-haired cheerleader called Nancy-Jean and driving a ludicrously big old car that probably extinguished three species on its own.

Anyway, it was a Saturday, Nancy-Jean was out of town, I was staying at her folks’ place in her room with the rainbow painted on the wall (as Werner used to say, ach, it vas all so long
ago…), I’d done a week’s worth of pretending to be in a Springsteen song working in a sawmill the other side of the tracks and apart from golf, which I don’t do because I don’t, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do. As we used to say.

I sat there on the bleachers (oh because that’s what they’re CALLED, ok?) and had myself a darned fine time. The steer wrestling was good. They got a steer and let it loose and anyone who thought they were hard enough grabbed it by the horns and wrestled it to the ground. Then they let it go. They didn’t have a whip or a gun or a stick, just their hands. It looked pretty equal to me.

Look, I know, ok? I’m not like that now. It was the past, it was definitely another country and they did things very differently there. But actually not so much, speaking as someone who had to get a lorry load of bullocks out of a pen and into a truck one dawn at Bridgewater Market. I was fourteen. I learned that bullocks are more scared of you than you are of them but it’s close. That if you twist the ring in their nose they’ll go anywhere you want. And that if you don’t you might end up sneezing your lungs out of your nose after they’ve slammed you into a metal fence and trodden on you.

I still wasn’t gonna go an wrassle a bull and that ain’t no lie.

I just watched and listened. A guy who was about my age now, wearing a cowboy hat, was talking a few feet away. I liked him. He was one of those people who could turn pretty much anything he said into a story and a good-natured one at that.

Even when what he was saying was serious. And sad. He told a woman a few seats away and pretty much anyone else who wanted to hear about his daughter. She’d bought herself one of those fancy Japanese cars, a Honda or a Toyota or something. And in the real world of Indiana back then, you didn’t do that. So he stopped talking to her. It had been months.

He said it was for a reason. Sure, it was a good car. Maybe better than a comparable American car. In fact no, definitely. She was smart. And it was cheaper. But if everybody did that there wouldn’t be no car industry. And that meant Americans, real ones he knew, up in Flint and Gary not even a hundred miles away, wouldn’t have jobs.

I don’t have much sympathy for the people who voted for Trump for a lot of reasons, but this one is up at the front. Actions have consequences. The first time I went to the US all the clothes in shops were from the USA. The second time, 12 years later, I couldn’t find any that were and they were less than half the price. If you buy cheap import stuff I don’t think you have the option of complaining about the lack of jobs at home.

And before anyone writes that off as elitist, that people on low incomes don’t have those choices, they do. They chose to buy a phone made in China and a network data plan instead of a $40 shirt from the USA. But they still need a shirt so they get a $15 one made in Guatamala instead. Funny how that factory closed and there ain’t no jobs here no more. Dang Democrats and their elitist globalisation. Trump all the way.

Tom Petty had to live with some hard promises. Springsteen told us we could count so many foreign ways to the price we paid. And now I’m as old as the guy in the cowboy hat back at the rodeo, I know they were both right. And Trump and his supporters are wrong and always wrong. Because there aren’t easy answers. What you do comes back to you.

Life, as Dr Hook put it, ain’t easy and nothing ain’t free. And cheap stuff isn’t. Sometimes you have to do without the things you want because of what will happen if you get them. Don’t want globalisation? Then don’t buy its products. People like Trump always promise it’s about personal responsibility; Thatcher did it too. But their biggest message was always the opposite: the bad stuff, that’s always someone else’s fault.

I ate a hot dog, watched the men wrassling steers and drove my big old Chevrolet back to Nancy-Jean’s house, up on the hill by the golf course, the good side of the tracks. A week later I drove down to Bloomington to see her, then drove out west on I-70 into my life, leaving her to hers.

Where the poppies blow

I don’t know much, if anything, about football. I’m the first to admit it. But I do know just a little about poppies and Remembrance Day because I’ve always worn one at this time of year. Which is more than footballers have.

Football’s governing body FIFA has decided that in the upcoming England v Scotland match the players shouldn’t wear poppies.

I don’t know whether they asked to, but FIFA has decided they shouldn’t as they class them as political symbols. Footballers, or more accurately, the tabloid press, which decides it’s “the voice of the people” that poppies aren’t a political symbol and our brave, hard-working footballers are being prevented from mourning Our Glorious Dead. Presumably by the tabloids’ worst thing of all, un-elected bureaucrats.

The funny thing is that this is new. Footballers didn’t wear poppies in 1945, when anyone on the England squad would have either known first hand what dead people looked like or would certainly have known someone who did. They didn’t in 1955 after Malaya, or 1966, the last time the highest-paid footballers in the world won the World Cup (just to remind everyone, 50 years ago, which doesn’t seem to make them very good at international football, to me) or at any time at all until the last ten years when a new kind of fake patriotism has made them popular along with Help For Heroes, a charity that manages to collect money but doesn’t seem to do quite so well giving it to people. Ex-Army people I know personally wouldn’t spit on it, let alone give to it, for exactly that reason.

More to the point, poppy wearing isn’t about patriotism. Or it was never supposed to be. It was about remembering the dead.

So I’m with FIFA. I would be hugely surprised if the new poppy herd can name two battles of either war, count how many people died, name a single general who got thousands of people killed or has any experience whatsoever of either World War for the obvious reason that anyone on the England squad now was only born a fraction of the 71 years ago that WWII ended. Wearing a poppy at a football match isn’t about caring. It’s about being seen to noticed as ‘caring.’

I’m deeply suspicious of a patriotism or anything else that needs to be seen to be genuine, literally. You mourn, or remember, or observe, in your heart. It’s nothing to do with wearing a badge to say how much you’re doing it.

People on Sunday

On Friday, without changing the subject, I got out of work early enough to stop in Woodbridge on the way home. I was looking for some mussels for dinner but somehow never got to the fish shop and by the time I would have done I’d found what I was really looking for anyway. Down a little alley, next to a deli and a bulding society and an upper floor flat that’s been for rent for I can’t remember how long, according to the sign in the window, there was a church hall.

There still is, but that’s not the point. It had a sign outside with two fatal words on it:

Book Sale

For anyone pretending to be civlised, there’s no choice but to go in. Because apart from books, some of which you’ll want, for pennies, you’ll get a glimpse of a life of if not quiet desperation then certainly one that careers masters don’t encourage. The life of the church hall bookseller.

I found a Cormac McCarthy I didn’t know existed (Outer Dark, since you ask. About incest. It’s Suffolk, after all). A history of the English Civil War, which I embarassingly know next to nothing about, aside from the liturgic Edghehill, Prince Rupert, New Model Army, Naseby, which hardly seems adequate. A magisterial account of the Dunkirk evacuation, where a friend’s father spent a solid week in the water at the end of a human pier, before being rescued and not by anyone looking remotely like Jenny Agutter. A book about the last days of WWII, after Hitler was dead, a time that fascinates me, for reasons I don’t fully understand. I think most of all I have the hugest admiration for people who literally had nothing left, who unlike the British, managed to parlay that into a scuccesful economdy within 5 years. And before any rabid Brexit tries the ‘ah yes, but they got a Marshall. Plan bailout, true, they did. And Britain got a factually much bigger one, and spent it on works outings, chips and a massive investment in cloth caps to tug. /in fact of course, Britain chose to bankrupt itself continuining to pretend it was a world power, first squandering its reputation on Aden and squandering its cash on thermonuclear weaponry, a programme so spectacularly rubbish that it ended up buying American anyway.

I would say I digress, but I don’t. Because the other thing I got at the book sale, apart from a chat with the guy who has read more than 95% of all graduates anywhere, because he does little else, manning the cash box, was a DVD. Yes, I know, how quaint. When you can explain how I can buy a second-hand streamed film I’ll listen.

The thing for me about book sales isn’t just the feeling that life outside has stopped, and there can be days when that’s a bad feeling indeed. It’s the idea that you don’t have to risk huge amounts on books you’ve never read or films you’ve never even heard of. And I’d never heard of People On Sunday. Ever.

Maybe it was because everyone in it died years ago. Or because it was a German silent film made in 1929, or all of those reasons and more. I bought it to learn about telling a story without words. Nobody spoke. Or they did, but you can’t hear them. They were all amateurs. There are about five frames of explanatatory text, but really I don’t think they needed it. Five young people on a Sunday do the things they used to do. I did. They probably still do. Sleep. Get out of the city. Listen to music. Try to cop off with each other in a half-hearted way. Find something a bit more challenging when they succeed.

It’s a moving film. It opens at Bahnhof Zoo and instantly you know something they didn’t. The whole place was going to be flattened. Anyone left there was going to be caught between mass-raping Russians and devoted Nazi death squads acting out thier own personal Gotterdamerung. Hardly a brick would be left. And watching this, none of them know it.

They knew it soon. Most of the people in the film got out of Germany soon after. Thier biographies read like the midcentury itself:

Erwin Splettstößer (de) Himself (taxi driver) – The five leading actors were all amateur actors. He liked acting and appeared later in small roles in two other films also directed by Robert Siodmak: Abschied (1930) and Voruntersuchung. In an unfortunate accident, he was run over by his own taxi in 1931 and died.

Brigitte Borchert (de) as Herself (record seller) – Like her film figure, Brigitte Borchert (born 1910) also worked as a Gramophone seller when she was discovered for this film. It was her only film, she later married the illustrator Wilhelm M. Busch in 1936. She died in Hamburg-Blankenese in August 2011, aged 100.

Wolfgang von Waltershausen as Himself (wine seller) – Born in 1900 into a wealthy family in Bavaria, he was a descendant of Georg Friedrich Sartorius. Waltershausen later had small roles in two other movies. During the Third Reich he worked in the mining industry, in post-war-Germany he sold books and audiocassettes. He was married twice and died in 1973.

Christl Ehlers as Herself (an extra in films) – Born 1910, the daughter of an harpsichordist and an artist. left Germany in 1933 and you know why. During the Second World War, she lived with her mother in the United States. She had a bit part in the Hollywood movie Escape (1940). She later married and had four more children, in addition to one child from a previous marriage. She worked with her husband in a family-owned aircraft company and also had her own vitamin business. Christina and her husband died in a private plane crash in New Mexico in 1960. All of her children are still living and reside in Northern California.

The one that haunts me most is the last, Annie Schreyer. The model. What became of her? Is she still part of the rubble under the new Bahnhof Zoo? There is no information about Annie Schreyer. Nothing on where or when she was born, nor where she died. Or when, or how, or with who. Just an hour of a girl in her early twenties, modestly but prettily enough dressed in a bathing costume, a skirt, a shirt, a hat, smoking a cigarette in the sun, laughing. Did she get out? Was she part of it? We don’t know anything at all. There is no information about Annie Schreyer. On this night when the dead walk I hope she may tread lightly, this black and white girl.

The cat thing

I always had animals around. When I was very small there were chickens and my collie dog. She probably wasn’t my dog really, but we used to go stealing together. From shops. She’d help me eat the things I got off the shelves when people weren’t looking. I was two.

I know this because we moved to Dorset when I was two and we were supposed to have had a black Labrador then. If it’s true I have no memory of it, whatsoever, which is an odd thing in itself.

Then we had a Pyrenean Mountain Dog because my demented father thought he could rent it to an advertising agency who were tired of the Dulux Dog. Despite being an accomplished liar and fantasist about whom my only regret is being dead he can’t actually read this, the Ad agency guys thought that a bit of consistency would be a better brand builder preferable to funding my father’s predictable progression from Ford Anglia to Mark II Jaguar.

Then the dogs stopped. There had been cats but they didn’t last. Until we adopted my feral cat, Fluff. At best she tolerated the rest of the family. But she got on with me fine.

When I got my own place a cat was one of the first things I got, long before a proper floor in the kitchen. Then another, to look after the first, and then came the Big Storm and suddenly two mother cats brought nine kittens in through the cat flap to the disconcertion of the residents, human and cat alike.

They were everywhere. When every alien in The X-Files was revealed to be basically a bald cat on growth hormones I wasn’t really surprised.

The funniest, Londonest Didn’t You Kill My Brother? time was on Green Lanes one dark, cold winter’s night. Back then it was a Greek area, mostly Greek Cypriots who had left in a hurry, but not so much of a hurry they’d forgotten their food. It was 1990 and local shops meant piles of fruit, gallon tins of olive oil and halva in plastic tubs, spicy sausages hanging outside the butchers and a Essex greengrocers who’d learned two extra languages so they could talk to the customers. You might call it an integrated community. We just called it Green Lanes.

Back on the Cypriot side of the street one night I went to get some vegetables in one of the open-fronted shops. There were two huge guys in their twenties behind the counter and a cardboard box on top of it. At any given time one of the guys was up close to the box, sometimes both of them. There was a gym bag on the floor. I looked to see where the baseball bat was, but they didn’t look as if they’d need one. When I got what I’d come for I got as close to the box as I casually could, trying to see what was inside. I thought it was the week’s takings.

The tiny kitten was something far more precious to two huge young men guarding it that winter night.

Up at the corners

Or; Why Anyone Saying That Needs To ask themselves why they’re in total denial

I didn’t smile much when I was a kid. It wasn’t some Dickensian horror-story about being made to be a pick-pocket or having to go round on a milk-float or frost on the windows inside in the winter. I only went round on a milk-float on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, because that was my Saturday job.

OK, my Milk Clothes stank of sour milk and couldn’t be used for anything else. Jeans on their literal last legs. A white sweatshirt I’d properly grown out of. A horrible blue nylon coat with weird gold fasteners on the front that now, would pass as a diamond-quilted hipster jacket, but not in Trowbridge back then it didn’t. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful. The deal, not the coat. The coat was.

We had Radio One on all the time and back then, that was something worth listening to. We also had the Christmas Eve we started way before dawn so we saw the sun rise through the steely high-pressure-over-Sweden blue winter sky, fuelled by home-made mince pies and whisky left out for us in the porch of council houses, next to the empties. I was fourteen or fifteen. It didn’t kill me. I wasn’t driving the milk-float.

For Proust it was little biscuits that reminded him the past was a different country. Not just one where they do things differently, but one where you can only get a visitor visa that goes out of date too soon. For me, bottles chinking together makes me wait to hear the clack of the solenoids, the deep rising tone of the electric motor winding up and then the sound of the float coasting to a halt again. A pipe tapped out on the door of the float.

Frost on the inside of the windows wasn’t special in those days. Pretty much everyone I knew knew all about that, rich and not very rich at all alike. A friend whose house was so big that the first time I saw it I mistook it for a hotel and asked directions to her house there had her own apartment on the top floor of what looked like half of Yorkshire. Her father refused to install heating up there on the basis that heated bedrooms were “bourgeois.”

On the top floor, anyway. They weren’t bourgeois on his own floor. The other floors were fine. So was the £23,000 he spent on his Purdeys, back when that would buy you a flat in a nice part of Bath.

But little kids generally don’t need to be told to smile most days. I’m not a parent, but I think I can say that pretty safely. If they do there’s something wrong.

Because there was never anything acknowledged to be something wrong, and there is only a finite amount of internet so some other time for that, I didn’t work out there was something wrong. Instead I behaved like a dissociated, self-regarding arse for quite a long time. Sometimes I still do. These days I realise there’s a pretty big difference between self-regard and self-awareness. Usually.

The trouble is – and this is the bit that trips everyone up, including, if not especially, people trying to help – is that when you’re not thinking straight you don’t know you’re not thinking straight. Especially in a culture that doesn’t discuss it, criticises it or tells you to just buck-up and stop being so self-pitying.

It works like this. If you have a white hair in your eye-brow you can see it. When you do there are things you can do. You can accept it. You can dye it. You can pluck it out. But if you don’t know it’s there then you can’t do any of that. And the thing with depression is exactly that. You don’t know it’s there when it’s starting, unless you really, really plug in to what’s going on with yourself. Which sounds like the kind of yurt-hugging thing Kate Archer would say. Which doesn’t help.

Often, all you know is you’re getting in more arguments than usual. Or maybe that’s just me, but it’s a reliable reminder to go for a walk and crucially, don’t self-medicate, because as a friend rammed home to me after trying to drown her own demons, there’s no such thing.

I’ll say it again. There is no such thing as self-medication. When you drink too much and call it self-medication you’ve now got two problems, the thing and the drinking. Except you’ve actually got more than that, because you’ve now still got the thing, plus the drinking, plus the physical and social consequences of that and the stuff you did that you can’t 100% remember entirely, plus most people have zero, but zilch sympathy with drunks. Only drunks think they do. Especially if they’re buying. Obliteration doesn’t help. And it certainly isn’t medication. It’s more denial. Which is how we got here in the first place.

Churchill had it. He ended-up drinking two bottles of brandy a day and slurping mashed-up steak and kidney pudding out of the bowl. That and weeping at the thought of the charred cities the RAF were smashing and continued to smash, because he couldn’t get himself together to say ‘Stop this. Enough.’ A commander who couldn’t command, who couldn’t face down his own subordinate, Sir Arthur Travers Harris. Air Marshall. The man the press called Bomber Harris. The man the RAF called Butcher. This is real history. The nation’s hero was drunk most of the war. Nobody can drink two bottles of brandy and not be drunk. It isn’t possible. Idols always have feet of clay.

For me, trigger signs are not putting the lights on, or if I have to, to cook or wash, just one when a ceiling light would mean I could actually see what I was cooking. That and total silence, no radio, no laptop, no CDs, no noise at all. That’s when I know it’s coming. Just putting some lights on can stop it.

Now I think of it like flu. Once you get it you stand more chance of getting it again. It might kill you if you let it, but the thing is, you don’t have to let it. There are things you can do to make it feel better. Lots of them. And they work, more so if you’re blessed with real friends who watch out for you and spot for you. But first you have to realise you’ve got it. And you know that you can always get it again.

Rabbit Ears and Rudolf Hess

Once upon a time I knew Trent Park quite well. In one of the periodic disaster periods of my life I took up running. I was living in Harringey, where although people ran to catch a bus or if they’d stolen someone’s purse, it wasn’t really the thing to do, back then.

Trent Park was pretty much the nearest big green place that wasn’t Finsbury Park and after saving some random girl from a flasher there (no, really. One morning on the way to work, since you ask) I didn’t much want to run there. Ditto Oak Hill Park where they dumped the body in Antonionionioni – I give up. Italian film-maker. Blow Up. Or so people said at the time.

trent-park

It meant going all the way out past Cockfosters, up Cat Hill where John Betjeman once taught at a school on the top, up out into the open fields of Middlesex. Just before the boundless promise of the M25 you turned right into parkland. Which was. Hidden behind the screen of trees and picnic areas was an old house that was something to do with the University of Middlesex. It’s now going to be sold off as what used to be called Yuppie flats. But before that, like the equally unlikely Warwick Castle, Trent Park was briefly home to Rudolf Hess. Debate-ably.

Radio 4 seemed surprised to broadcast, along with Helen Lederer, that as I’d found out twenty years previously, during WW11 important German officers and Rudolf Hess were taken after capture to Trent Park, not for a walk or a run but for a chat. Obviously, they didn’t give much away. Until they were back in their cells, when they did, unaware that it was now possible to listen-in on conversations using this new-fangled microphonic technology.

Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy. To say he was important was something of an understatement. According to the official record, one day he decided to steal an airplane and fly to Scotland to have a chat with the Duke of Hamilton, who he thought might have a chat with Lord Halifax, who might have a chat with Churchill, who might call the war off. Nothing implausible there, obviously. Nor in the fact that this act of unarguable treachery wasn’t repaid by the liquidation of the entire Hess family, which was pretty much standard practice in Germany at the time. Nothing personal.

The debate over Rudolf Hess was always whether or not it was him at all, not least that the British Army surgeon detailed to look after him in Spandau Prison where he spent the last half of his life was adamant that the man he was looking after simply didn’t have the injuries that Rudolf Hess had received in France in 1917. Notwithstanding too that the old man’s voice had deepened with age, according to his wife, who didn’t initially recognise the man she visited, an odd exception to the rule that old men’s voices generally get higher as they age. If, of course, it was the same man.

There was nothing at Trent Park to tell the visitor any of this. Nothing to tell the students there that some of the people who’d stayed there were if not the architects of the Final Solution, had at least helped it on its way.

None of that was visible at all when I ran there. I remember the dew on the grass. The pink of rabbits ears on a hill with the sun behind them. The long drag back down to Green Lanes. The headline about Steve Marriot burning to death the year before. The church hall where a friend once saw The Who, before they were famous. According to Wikipedia today, Blow Up wasn’t filmed in north London at all. History changes. Trent Park too.

Behave, baby!

A tale for children

I never got on with Philosophy. I thought I would, but the world changed one summer and something broke, although what it was I never knew.

The Georgian terrace at the end, beginning, middle and all other points of the universe.

I’d been to a uni interview back in the times when that seemed to fill weeks, choosing what to wear, what book to take. What book to be seen to take, sometimes, although quoting Horace Greely didn’t get me into Sussex to do English and American Studies, not least as the interviewer didn’t seem to have actually heard of the father of American journalism, not that long after American journalism had removed a President instead of making a lawyer’s daughter’s arse a celebrity in its own right. I took my paperback Nietzsche to a uni bar and talked about him based on the extensive insight I’d picked up reading it on the train, the way students are supposed to. And when I went there that autumn I signed up for the additional Philosophy courses.

We didn’t do Nietzsche. The first lecture started with a little discourse on kibbutzim by the Head of School. I was in my estimation at least, something of an expert on the topic, having at least lived on one for the past few months which it became very obvious the lecturer hadn’t. Philosophically perhaps it may have been better not to mention it. At least not with an audience of 200 people. But hey, open discussion among equals was supposed to be what kibbutzim were all about. As he should have known.

The second lecture asked us why dolphins weren’t invited to lectures, given they could speak, then asked us how we knew that once the lecture hall doors were shut we wouldn’t be gassed. I’d spent the summer with people who pretty much never did assume exactly that, given that millions of their parents had been before they decamped to the Negev desert. I suspected the dolphins would have been first irritated then, like me, wondering if there wasn’t something they could do on a sunny afternoon with less bullshit involved.

Maybe they did parallel universes later in the course, after I’d taken my black needle-cords, alpaca sweater and red Kicker boots elsewhere. BBC Radio 4 did this week. It wasn’t much better. I still didn’t see the point.

Apparently, there are or could be or some other Schroedinger-type condition where there are and aren’t an infinite number of parallel universes. All at the same time, or possibly no time.

I wasn’t listening that closely. Because listening, I thought what I thought back in that lecture hall: haven’t these people got anything else to actually DO? Who pays them? And why? Anyway, an infinite number of universes. Limitless numbers of everything. In literally, no time at all. Apparently, this stuff is useful to someone.

Anyway, an infinite number of universes. Limitless numbers of everything. In literally, no time at all. Apparently, this stuff is useful to someone.

And the day went on and philosophy didn’t bother me again and Nietzsche still didn’t get read and Facebook somehow did instead. Someone had posted a recipe I liked. I hadn’t imagined her as someone who could cook although I’d eaten food she’d made. It was fine. Just that some people you think ‘cook’ and some people you think other things about.

Cook. It wasn’t something I’d thought about. Someone who could talk, smoke, walk with, make you think, yes, all of those things. All of those. But Mother Aga wasn’t a role I’d seen her in.

You have to be able to cook if you’re a vegetarian, she said. Unless you live in Bath.

And suddenly the image of living as vegetarians in Bath roiled up in my mind like billowing white clouds over the sea on a summer evening. In fact, it didn’t. It filled my mind entirely, like a paradisiacal vision of eternity. The more so because in that parallel universe, or maybe this one, if not no, this one, we do. In another, we always have. In another, we always will. In another, we invite a 25 year-old Kate Bush and Debby Harry round for a bi foursome every weekend.

And none of it true and almost certainly, in this universe, not going to happen. Apart from the vegetarian thing. One out of three ain’t bad, as a post-Austerity Meat Loaf might have said. But maybe I’m still not quite getting the point of Philosophy. Unless it’s for making the day appreciably better every time I think about pretend things.

Suddenly it was summer

When I hear it, when I hear that music, those electric piano notes, pressed by real fingers, back in the ludicrous days when a musician actually had to write a song or play an instrument or sing themselves, roughly in tune, without Simon Cowell to recite the reality TV mantra that ‘you’re the best, you’re so talented’, back when then was then and all that meant, there was this song.

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air
You better watch out
There may be dogs about
I’ve looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem.

I couldn’t have written it better myself, even though it was years before anyone invented Jordan. They just didn’t have the technology in those days. And thi9ngs weren’t what they seemed. I went to university later, when people still talked about ‘the revolution’ while ignoring totally the one going on outside their own window. We had The Sweeney and Orgreave. Eeeh, young folk don’t know they’re born these days…

animlas

There was always this song, then. Or that song. When there was no such thing as streaming, when the most far-out thing you could do was haul a cassette recorder around with you, on a strap, music wasn’t as much a thing as it is now. It was more of a thing.

iutt-sl54

There was Top Of The Pops on Thursdays, on one of the only three TV channels that existed. There was Radio One, which was what people in garages listened to. And there was Luxy, Radio Luxembourg. And that strange thing from Keynesham, sometimes on an expedition into the Long Wave or Short Wave dials. I can’t remember which and it doesn’t matter anyway. Old, d’you see?

We didn’t have as much music. We had so much more of it. Without the massive choice, everyone knew the same music. And naturally divided into camps. Apart from Abba. Everyone, but EVERYONE didn’t much like Abba, except for Mums and Dads.

10cc was for what used to be called getting it on, which was pretty much the same as getting off with, but more comfortably, usually. If you couldn’t make it happen by half-way through the second side of The Original Soundtrack then you were definitely doing it wrong.

But Animals was something else. Especially the Sheep track. See what I did there? I know. Anyway, I was going to say that was then, but it really wasn’t. Whenever I hear those first few bars it’s summer.

It’s summer and I’ve got long hair and a Triumph motorcycle and a girlfriend I don’t want and haven’t got the girl I do. I’ve got a boat to sail at school and a friend I didn’t know then was going to be with me all my life, thankfully. I’ve got a bed with an actual eiderdown, which is hideously heavy, because although I’ve seen duvets with my own eyes, there’s certainly none of that foreign nonsense in this house, which I’m regularly told I treat like a hotel. This house where I’m forbidden to have a bath more than six inches deep, in case I use all the hot water and how am I going to wash my hair every day if I don’t, in a world where the only alternative is those stupid rubber things you put over the taps, the ones that come off when they get hot so you suddenly get a head full of cold water.

I’ve got a pale yellow sink in the corner of my room and a metal trunk under my bed. I’ve got a desk for homework under the window I leave open for my old cat to come through, up over the bench and the oil tank and the garage roof, the route we share when I get home after Lights Out and Taps has been sounded, which they may as well have been, some time around 11.

I hear that music and I am back there, where the army’s artillery barrage flickered all over the night sky every summer from the training ranges 20 miles away. Where I could hear someone’s Norton Commando winding out towards the crossroads five miles away towards the hamlet where the girl I didn’t have lived in an old vicarage.

I never got a Norton Commando, or an old vicarage. Nor sadly, her. But I can listen to that music now and any time, suddenly it’s summer. And somehow I’ve got all of that and more.

The sweet spot

Saturday and a new job starting tomorrow. One I’ve wanted to do, one that I’ve been angling for for a year since asking on the off-chance. The heat of the year is gone and the wind moving the blinds is cool on my skin.

This is my time of year, the time I was born. The time, literally this year, of going back to school, but not the school I went to and not the lessons I had to sit through.

Not too, the roads I used to know to get there, nor my friend I used to hitch to Bath with. Nor Limpley Stoke hill covered with trees, nor Bath itself, where the head-shops sell Agas now.

I bake bread about three times a week. Sourdough depends on a lot of things, but on its culture largely. I think too, on the temperature. And right now, it’s sourdough sweet spot temperature, not too cold, not too warm. I make it because bread from shops is never my bread. There are breads I like as much, but not many of them.

The recipe is always the same. 300g of flour and pretty much any flour will do. 200g of water, weighed into the bowl. Olive oil, salt. And the culture. And maybe a little more water. After a day, when it’s bubbling, another 300g of flour, knead it just a bit and give it another day. Then bake it.

The culture’s been going since August Bank Holiday 2012, when I got back from my friend’s house in Dorset and started writing Not your Heart Away. I haven’t stopped. And I haven’t stopped baking, either. I’ve been doing both this morning.

Where I grew up I was told that nobody would want to read anything I wrote. Some people have different parents. Ones who know what people want to read, for example. They were wrong, but it’s taken a long time to get that message out of my head.

I finally know what I’m doing. People do read it and more will. And today, this Saturday with a hint of chill about it, the weather just right to let you know that with hot comes cold, with summer comes winter, that lets you know that the season of hitching through foggy Wessex valley bottoms in a maniacally driven blue Mazda truck is also the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, that lets you know that being there, then, was a precious gift, that my friend is and was and will be too, this is a sweet spot.

The bread’s come out just right. Maybe this morning’s writing has, too.

…but is it art?

We all know what happened in 1066. Guillaume won at Senlac. Oh come on, you did know that. Just the same way you didn’t really think Jesus had Palestinian friends called Timothy and Mark. Oh. Well, sorry to be the one to break it to you.

Anyway, arrows, battles, and the country lost by the same trick as at Maldon not even 70 years before. It always worked. Both times the invaders had got themselves bottled up where they could be dealt with, the Danes/Vikings at Maldon on an island in the Colne/Blackwater and the Normans, who were also Danes and Vikings who’d been kicked out of Denmark for being too violent (try to keep that one in mind. Vikings who were too violent for Viking sensibilities) cooped up at the bottom of a hill so they had to attack upwards. Which is N times more difficult when you’re wearing armour and can’t put your shield above your head and in front of you at the same time.

Both times the Saxons’ sense of honour screwed it for them. Both times the Danes/Vikings said ‘if you were real men you’d have a fight on the flat.’ Unbelievably stupidly, they did. And lost. Twice.

But arguably a bigger loss was to art. Like maybe a lot of people, I just assumed that until about 1400, artists just weren’t much good. I’ve seen Greek and Roman pottery where someone obviously knew how to make an image that actually looks like a person, but until deep in the Middle Ages all I’d seen were cartoonish two-dimensional finger-painting. I mean, look at the Bayeux Tapestry.

Now ok, it was made by the Bayeux W.I. but by any standards, the level of art isn’t exactly great.

The Tring Tiles, 300 years later, weren’t much better. They’re fun and funny for quite other reasons. It isn’t just the fact they seem to have come from Tring church and ended up being sold in the antique shop there years and years ago, presumably sold off by the vicar. Funnier is the fact that the tiles show a series of not-very-Biblical stories. Or maybe they are. Either way, in each story the young Jesus acts like someone young. His teacher slaps him for either not paying attention or for Holy Smartmouth.

He makes little pools at the side of the river and a bigger kid comes along and smashes them up. So Jesus superpowers him dead until Mary comes along and makes him bring the bully back to life or no supper. Jesus’s friend’s dad reckons Jesus is a bad influence and locks his friend up so he can’t go and play with the Messiah, who promptly miracles him through the keyhole. If you think I’m making this stuff up, think again.

They’re fun. Bonkers, but fun. And the most believable, human, Man made God stories I’ve ever heard. Or seen. But there’s the issue. The artwork itself can’t really be called all that good.

I thought that was just the way it was. Dark Ages, the handy thing to blame for everything after Rome fell. They forgot how to draw? I can’t believe that and my walk around the British Museum yesterday told me it obviously wasn’t true. I can’t claim to have discovered Carolingian artwork (or can I? I’d never seen it before…..) and it was a revelation.

Accurate representational art from the 800s. And 200 years later we get the cartoon 2D of Bayeux and 300 years after that the same again from Tring. I can’t channel Brian Sewell, maybe unfortunately. But I’d really like to know how art became less realistic before it became more so. And why.