Category: My Other Stuff

Closing down the options

There are things you’re allowed to say, these days. And other things you’re not. Increasingly, you’re not allowed to ask certain questions.

An opinion for all seasons. But you aren't supposed to mention that.
        An opinion for all seasons. But you aren’t supposed to mention that.

Not because you don’t need to know, but because the answers will embarass somebody else. Somebody who doesn’t have the answers.

Who ought to. Because that’s their job. But becaue they patently havent done their job that’s not their fault, but yours. So we won’t be talking about it and that’s official. Now get back to watching Kendra On Top or The Only Way Is Essex or whatever it is people like you do all the time.

Allowable debate.
                                 Allowable debate. Talk about this all you like.

You can’t have failed to notice Boris Johnson (eezalarf, innee?) doing his usual “as Pericles put it” act over Europe. This week he doesn’t want to be part of a Europe that will let 77 million Turks come to the UK. Let’s assume, for a second, that that’s what they’d all do, because of the generous benefits system and the bountiful job opportunities which benefit Schrodinger’s Immigrant, the one who takes your job and sits on the dole at the same time.  Let’s assume Turkey gets membership of the EU. Which is more than moot, for a host of reasons. Why or more pertinently how won’t Turkish people be able to come into the UK if the UK isn’t part of the EU? And what will the IRA have to say about it? Or the Ulster Unionists? Or Sinn Fein?

It’s a serious question but nobody even wants to ask it. Because if the UK did leave the EU, the only physical way it could stop EU migrants coming into the UK would be to close the border with Eire. Passport control. Visas. A big, big fence. Customs posts. Immigration checks. At the moment you just drive through a border that’s just a line on a map. Nobody checks your pasport. Nobody asks you the purpose of your visit. There isn’t anybody there to even ask you. A bit like the fearless UK media, and this question itself.

If the UK leaves then any EU citizen who wanted to get in would Easyjet to Dublin and get on the next coach north. And they’re in, miraculously taking your job and sitting around doing nothing at the same time, according to the tabloid press. Who haven’t mentioned any of this.

Docklands, 9/2/96. Non-allowable debate.
Docklands, 9/2/96. Non-allowable debate.

In case you’ve forgotten, not very long ago there were riots and bombs taking out half of Docklands because some people wanted a united Ireland. A whacking great wall across it isn’t going to significantly further this ambition, so far as I can see.

It’s not debated. It’s not discussed. It just isn’t a question anyone is allowed to ask. And it makes me sad that this is the level of debate now. Tony Blair gets wheeled out to make people do the oposite of anything he says, presumably, while this fairly big issue, one which could kick over the whole balance of the Good Friday agreement and make every tabloid editor re-calibrate the dial on the suto-hate press machine from Moslems to Irish people isn’t even being mentioned. But obviously, we needn’t trouble our pretty little heads about it. Grown-ups like Boris and Blair will sort it all out, the same way they always do. With a big war we can’t afford, that’s built on lies, whcih does nothing but destabalise the area and that we’ll lose, if their track record is anything to go by.

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Suddenly it’s May

Suddenly it’s May and I remember this is when the sun shone.

This is when I walked in new grey jeans, new boots too,

Through the woods I’d always meant to walk in,

Dappled in unfamiliar sunlight with your dogs

Walking them along the river path back to you.

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Silver-black phantom bike

Long ago and far away
Long ago and far away

I got my first bike at 16. Sort of. It was a FS1-E, a Yamaha, a moped. I had a horrible cheap blouson leather jacket of the kind the Fonz used to wear and that was about as far as the resemblance went. About as far as the time I went into the Polish deli in Trowbridge, thinking it was going to be like a deli in New York in the films, full of guys in fedoras and trenchcoats and women looking like Marilyn Monro. It wasn’t.

But anyway, the FS1-E was the first step to freedom. Then I got a Honda CD175, chiefly because it was bigger and a ‘real’ motorcycle, but there wasn’t much style about it. Then I passed my test on a Triumph 250 Trailblazer and stupidly swapped it for a Norton Dominator (steady on, old girl) that ran for about two months out of the two years I had it. And then this one.

I had other bikes after this. A BMW 1000. A Harley Sportster that started as an 883 and got bored out to 1,000cc with a fuel-injector bolted on. But this one in the picture, this one was different. This one was my bike.

I found it in a shop in Southampton in my second term at the university there. Someone had taken a Triumph 650 Tiger engine and bolted into a chromed Norton Slimline frame. It had started out as a cafe racer I think, but somewhere along the line someone had put higher handlebars on it. They hadn’t painted the tank, which is why it was £300. I sold my VW Beetle to get it.

It was the first big bike I’d had, but it didn’t seem to weigh much. I never knew what the top speed was because with the high bars on the wind was too much to deal with much above 85. It was happiest on the roads like the A36 back then, which was a windy two-lane with hardly any police on it ever, that snaked along the river valley out of Bath and out towards the Red Lion at Rode, then wound on out along another valley towards Salisbury, through Warminster, Codford St Mary and Codford St Peter. There was a difference. One had a garage that sold petrol.

Pretty much as soon as I got it to Bath the clutch packed up, but I learned how to change the worn-out clutch plates and put them in and true them up myself. I was proud of that.

The exhausts were another story. I didn’t like the look of the silencers on there and they were a bit rusty anyway, so to complete the look I got rid of them. It was insanely loud like that, so I went to Halford and bought two silencers stubs for a VW Beetle and rammed them into the pipes. That sort-of worked but it didn’t look right. Back to Halfords and a pair of slash-cut luke-warm car exhaust end-pieces. Job done.

Naturally, there were problems. The sidestand was always too  short and there was never a centre-stand. When I clipped a manhole cover leaned over, powering out of a bend in streaming rain on the last long straight under Salisbury race-course the back end flipped out to the right, then left, then right like a snake with its head caught. I knew if I touched the brakes that would be the end of everything and all I could do was the right and only thing, just roll the throttle back very, very slowly and somehow it stopped doing it. I never once dropped that bike, let alone hit the highway like a battering ram, whatever Mratloaf might have advised.

The biggest problems started after I set light to it though. I’d spent two weeks painting the fuel tank blacker than a very black thing indeed, spray, sand it back, spray, sand it back, spray, sand it back at about twelve-hour intervals until I ran out  of first paint, then spray varnish. At the end of that it didn’t look black, it practically shone as it absorbed all other colours. And equally naturally, I’d sprayed paint inside the tank so as soon as I put petrol in it for its inaugural run it flaked off and clogged the fuel line. A nineteen mile jounrey took over an hour and a half because it kept stopping until I got off and blew and sucked the crud out of the fuel line. Got to girlfriend’s house. Kicked it over to start it up. Blowback.

Because someone had junked the air filter there wasn’t anything to stop a backfire spurting flame out of the carburettor. But this was then and air filters were a bit effete. It didn’t matter. It was just like a match flaring. You just reached down and turned the fuel tap off and it would go out. No problem.

Except I couldn’t find the fuel tap and pulled the fuel line off instead, still sitting on the bike I’d just put two gallons of petrol into. I thought I probably couldn’t run faster than two gallons of exploding petrol so I’d better put it out. Luckily I had a full face helmet on, and a leather jacket fitting sweetly to my brain, as the Stranglers used to put it, and more to the point, long leather gloves on. I couldn’t see past half-way down my arm because of the flames. I remember that. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling.

By the time I got it out the fire had melted the insulation off the horn so it was fused ‘on.’ My girlfriend’s mother had seen it all happen. She came out of the house and said my bike had leaked oil on her drive. After that we found other transport and other things to do. The last ride on it ever was one late Spring evening alone, out around Larkhall and the combes running up to Charmy Down on the northeast edge of Bath before I rode back to the house in the picture, next to the little park where nightingales sang one night as I walked out of there. I remember every part of that slow, sad ride, feeling the cold start to seep into the bones of my legs, smelling that blend of hot oil and cold petrol and Spring and the smell of just being alive there and then, in Bath, a long time ago. It was my bike.

 

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Racing In The Street

I mean, come on. I don’t do this stuff any more. Seriously. But if I did, I’d do it in this. I got it two months ago, after the kiss-off present someone gave me finally went to the Big Breakers Yard In The Sky. Assuming they still have breakers’ yards. I only know one now. There used to be loads of them, even one just outside Bath, with piles of cars, literally stacked on top of each other. You used to take your spanners and climb up the stack of cars and take off the bits you wanted, then go and show them to the bloke in the hut who’d charge you enough to cover the part you’d somehow forgotten to show him as well and everyone was happy. Everyone except the next door neighbours, presumably, and whoever had to sit next to you stinking of cold engine oil.

But this isn’t like that. It’s old enough, I agree. Older than the old Vauxhall Astra it replaced, when the string of good cars had gone back to whoever they  were leased from and times were not that bright. And this is the silly thing.

IMG_0218

People are going bananas about this car. I keep saying look, it’s just a car. It  doesn’t alter who I am. It goes along the road. It’s actually older than the one it replaced, with more miles on it.

But whatever it is about it, it seems to make a difference. It doesn’t drive as if it’s got a lot of miles on it. 185 brake horsepower also means it shifts along considerably quicker than a Vauxhall Astra, however spotty and adenoidal the driver might be. But it does it differently, as well. It looks, I don’t know. Sort of respectable as well. Even though it goes like I don’t know what.

And the good news is there doesn’t seem to be anything much wrong with it. The pixels on the trip mileometer aren’t showing up and I think that was what prompted the previous owner to get rid of it, thinking as I did that it was going to be hundreds to fix the display screen. Which it would be.  Except ten minutes on the internet tells you that this pixel failure is a standard thing on these Saabs and it’s not the screen. It’s a data cable that comes loose, it’s been known about for years. And a replacement one just cost less than £15 on Amazon. By the time it arrives from Poland I’ll have memorised the YouTube video on how to pop the display out and press the new cable on.

The back tyres could do with a look at, because although the tread is absolutely fine there’s some age-related issues in the sidewalls I’d be happier if someone who knew what they were doing saw them, rather than me. The power hood stuck yesterday, announcing it wasn’t going to open with a little aircraft seatbelt-style bing. That turned out to be a huge pot I’d got at a boot sale being in the way.

Fuel-wise, the trip mileometer says it averages about 35 to the gallon, which for a 2.0 litre turbocharged car seems ludicrously good to me and I’ve seen 40+ mpg on the dial on a long 70mph run on dual-carriageways.

The leather on the driver’s seat is crazing a bit and it’s going to need regular saddle-soaping, but that’s what the cleaning stuff box is for, supplying things like that. I ran out of neatsfoot oil about a year ago.

The message “Fill coolant supply” flashed on three days ago. Half a bottle of £4.50 coolant fluid from the local garage seems to have switched that message off today.

So good. The power hood goes up or down in about half a minute, once you’ve unlocked the reassuringly heftily-engineered latch that keeps it in place. Everything about this car is solid and thought-through, secure and made properly. I like it in a way I haven’t liked a car for years. It suits me for now.

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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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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.