Songs Without Music – Page 3

Behind the mic

Not at DP's bar any time soon. Pity. — Not at DP’s bar any time soon. Pity.

People stared at the makeup on his face,laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace. The boy in the bright blue jeans jumped on the stage. Lady Stardust sang the songs of darkness and dismay. And it was alright, the band was altogether, yes it was alright, the song went on forever and it was out of sight, really quite Paradise. We sang all night, all night long.

David Bowie, Lady Stardust

Ok, doing stand-up poetry (yes I know it’s not real poetry) gigs on the Suffolk coast isn’t quite like heading the bill at the Hammesmith Odeon and I can’t quite squeeze into that off the shoulder Mr Fish dress but now I know the feeling that the song was about.

For fifteen years I did business presentations. I did the Powerpoints, memorised the subject, which was usually marketing research and the details and results of the job we’d done for the clients and got up there on my hind legs. I got a bit of a reputation for being at every conference and it was true. I loved it. It was hard work in a way that a coal-miner or a farmer wouldn’t recognise. We’d fly in somewhere and with my favourite client that owned and launched satellites I’d be picked up by car from my house and driven to the airport. We’d fly Business class and get a decent taxi to a hotel the other end. I hadn’t been to any five star hotels as a guest before that. I got to know them in Amsterdam, Sydney, Hong Kong, the places you see advertised in the Financial Times. We’d get changed, shower, do some sight-seeing and shopping, and do the presentation. Afterwardsyou were expected to party. And talk. And be sociable. Until as the host you were the last man standing. Next day there would be seminars to lead, lunch, sightseeing, presentation, dinner, party. Last day was sightseeing, lunch, airport.

At all times you were expected to look as if you were enjoying yourself. Drinking was encouraged and it was fabulous restaurant bars and free (because the client was paying) five star alcohol. You were almost expected to get off your face, civilly and happily. And God help you if you failed to show for an event the next day.

It was an old-fashioned world and it took its own toll. One person I knew got stage-fright. He got so nervous about presentations that the only way he could do them was to lie down behind the stage curtain before it went up. Otherwise he’d hyperventilate and get the literally paralysing cramps that stop you breathing to regulate the oxygen in your blood which works, but it makes you feel as if you’re having a heart attack. And yes thanks, I’ve had that happen twice in my life, but never because I had to go on stage.

But I still get just a bit nervous before I go on. Always it’s half-way through the previous act, the one before I go on. I get that stomach-clamping feeling and something happens in my neck and I have to think clearly. We were at DP’s in Aldeburgh last night, a nice, friendly place and crowd. I knew lots of people there, I’d played to them before, some were saying how much they were looking forward to my stuff. But it still happens.

It cripples some people. The way I deal with it works for me. I just have a chat with myself, in my head. I say to myself what a friend used to tell her show-jumping daughter. You don’t have to do it. Really. If it’s really that bad, just don’t do it. Nobody’s going to make you do it. It’s perfectly ok. They’ll get by without you, don’t worry about that. Just don’t do it.

And then I tell myself to just shut up. If I wasn’t going to do it there wouldn’t have been any point coming here.

So you get your stuff in order. Feel the mood in the room and decide what you’re going to do to fit the mood. Walk forward, turn to face them and smile. It’ll be ok.

“Some people think that poetry should rhyme but there’s more to words than that…”

And again

I’ve just been harangued. That’s either an Oooooh, Betty moment (no, I don’t know why it was so screamingly funny now either, but it truly was) or something odd is still going on with the stuff I don’t call poetry.

Just saying it can even make it happen, apparently. I’m waiting.

When I first started doing stand-up in pubs three months ago, although it seems like a lot longer than that, I came up with this intro, just to let people know that luckily for them, I hadn’t forgotten my guitar so nobody was going to lend me one.

I called it Words Without Music and I still use it sometimes to introduce the set, mainly because I can remember it, but also because to me at least, it says ‘this is a bit of fun, there might be some serious, even maybe moving themes in the stuff I’m going to be doing, it might make you think but let’s face it, if you want therapy or deep insight I’m not Oliver Sacks.’

Some people say that poetry should rhyme,

But there’s more to words than that.

Sometimes rhyming just produces doggerel at worst;

Very often you could hardly call it verse.

It’s not, let’s be honest, Shakespeare. Is it? Actually, some of Shakespeare’s rhymes were just as crap as that, but I’m not claiming that’s anythingbut what it is, something mildly amusing, to be heard in a pub when you’re out having fun, ’twas mine, ’tis his and will be a slave to thousands. Oh no, I can feel it coming on again! But seriously folks, that’s all it is. Or that one, anyway.

From the first time I’ve done this stuff outside my own kitchen I’ve been surprised by people’s reactions. Total strangers have thanked me for saying some of the things I write about, several people have been near tears and presumably not because it’s so rubbish, although I can’t be sure. I’ve had good-natured heckling which is all part of the fun and heckling from a woman in her eighties who was incensed that I’d called Mothering Sunday Mother’s Day.

“It’s not Mothers Day,” she said, loudly and clearly.

I think you’ll find that’s what today is. madam, I oiled. I didn’t add ‘actually.’ Should have.

“I think you’ll find today is Mothering Sunday,” said someone’s mum, who’d been taken there by her pink-haired daughter specifically to hear my poetry. Which was nice. Especially as I’ve no recollection of ever seeing her daughter before. Email me here if you like. We can you know, talk about poetry. If your mum doesn’t mind.

I’ve had people hammering on my door demanding I don’t perform any more “drivel,” or in fact anything else, anywhere, ever again. But today, Songs Without Music as I call the little intro piece came in for special attention. Another lady came over to steam in.

“You said rhymes were rubbish and a bad thing. And yet you’ve just rhymed prose. Some people at my poetry group are very sensitive. Why do you say the things they do are bad then go and do them?”

Er well, that’s not really exactly what I said. I explained that some of Betjeman’s stuff, love it though I do, is utter tosh, as he was the first to agree, because sometimes, just sometimes, he chases the rhyme to the exclusion of sense. If you don’t agree, read The Young Executive. Which is funny and biting and lovely, but John, please. The rhymes.

I am a young executive, no cuffs than mine are cleaner,

I own a slimline briefcase and I drive the firm’s Cortina.

And who says he was just chasing the rhyme? Me. Because just a couple of lines later the young exec has to have an Aston-Martin, because that’s more in keeping, although not even Betjeman could find anything to rhyme with that.

But rhymes aside, I was bemused. I’ve got used to pierced and shaved-headed people looming up and grabbing my arm and saying ‘thank-you’ when I thought they were going to lamp me. I’m still not used to the idea that anyone gives two monkeys for any opinion they think they can see in my stand-up stuff. Especially when it’s not what I said.

As it was I had to juggle my dry sherry from hand to hand while having no wish to offend provided this stopped quite soon I tried very politely to point out that actually, I hadn’t said that all poetry that rhymes was rubbish, that I was quite surprised anyone gave a toss what I thought about it in the first place and if anyone had the balls to stand up and do poetry then brilliant, and they shouldn’t give much of a good goddamn what anyone who didn’t had to say about it. Except my haranguer was a lady of a certain age and you just can’t, really.

But I’m still quite surprised. Not that people get things wrong. I’m very used to that. Sometimes it’s stuff in their heads. Sometimes it’s the way I say things. Sometimes, to be honest, that’s even deliberate. What surprises me is anyone thinks there’s anything I’ve got to say in stand-up that ought to change their life. I mean, if that’s true it’s about time I wrote something about going back in time and eloping with Kate Bush. Then maybe she’ll come to her senses as well.

An Eighty Percent Chance of Pain

I was asked, out of the blue, to do some poetry for Mother’s Day, my first real grown-up paid-for gig. My relationship with my mother is distant, to say the least. There was a lot of confusion about my whole family while I was growing up, many myths and legends and deliberate obfuscation. So I wrote this, about that kind of chaos and ran it by a friend who has a family. We’d been talking earlier that day. Something she said gave me the key to the thing, the eighty percent line.

She said there were tears in her eyes by the time she’d finished reading and not because it was so rubbish. It was quite hard to write it. It’s quite difficult to perform. It needs plenty of pauses and when you’re somewhere loud that’s not always comfortable, leaving the audience to their own devices. In case anyone is confused, some of it is true, like anything. Some of it isn’t. It’s a poem. Not a documentary. But to my friend, sorry. I didn’t mean you to cry.

An Eighty Percent Chance of Pain

My mother lives in a nursing home.

My mother was afraid of guns

Or what they did.

She was born in a time of black and white

Photos and Spitfires and the Blitz on Bristol

And burning warehouses

And the sky red as she left for school

In the morning,

The scholarship girl at a steam-haunted country station.

The red was fire. The red was the death of a city.

Not a shepherd’s promise

But it never was.

Red sky at night was shepherd’s delight

Red sky in the morning was shepherd’s warning

Although who he was warning is moot.

Maybe me. She went to London.

She trained as a nurse.

She had sharp elbows and a sharp tongue

And hard fists. As I learned.

Actually that’s not even vaguely true.

She never used her fist.

She used the ball of her hand.

She would take me by the wrist.

She used her left hand for this

Dragging me off balance

And hit me in the side of my head

With the ball of her right hand.

It didn’t leave a bruise.

She worked in an Old People’s Home then.

Other people have other mothers.

That one was mine. It was because

I looked like my father, I think.

I found a photograph when I was in my twenties.

It was summer, after university.

I went to my mother’s house with a girlfriend.

One hot afternoon while we were wondering

If there was enough time to go upstairs

We looked through a box of old photographs,

Concluded that there wasn’t and found me,

Standing next to a waterfall I’d never been to

In front of a green lagoon I’d never seen

With a woman with a floral, elaborate,

Large swimming costume

Large as in the amount of skin it covered.

It was not large.

She was not large.

I had no recollection

Of ever having had this photograph taken

For a good reason. It was not me.

It was my father, the father my mother hated.

We never knew how much was true.

She said that he had been born in Australia.

He wasn’t. I found that out in two hours

In Somerset House as it used to be

At end of the Strand 30 years ago.

Something else we can’t mention.

She claimed he was a bigamist,

That she had tried to divorce him

But you can’t divorce people

You’re not married to;

In fifteen minutes on a mobile phone

On the internet last week, a man in a pub

Discovered that if my father was a bigamist then

He was using a different name.

Only one marriage was recorded to that man.

Other people have other mothers;

That one was mine.

We had to move abruptly

When my father was briefly imprisoned

Not for bankruptcy as I thought as a child

But for contempt of court, not meeting

The payments on the money he owed

Which even as a bankrupt you have to do

If you earn anything. And he did.

He always earned something.

Quite a lot, it seemed.

He was running two families

For eleven years. Two houses. Two mortgages.

His cars seemed quite modest. Ford Anglias

On the firm as people said in those days.

I last saw him driving a gold-painted Mk II Jaguar

The back seat filled with carpet of questionable provenance.

He’d run off with a hairdresser in Andover.

Maybe.

Four years later he died

Still causing trouble to the living.

He had a heart attack at the wheel of his car.

A different car. An Audi on the firm again.

And even after he was dead he drove his car

Into three other parked cars.

At some speed, apparently.

According to the coroner.

Other people have other families;

That was mine.

I talked for three quarters of an hour today

To a friend a quarter of a world away.

She’s a mother but not of any child of mine.

I asked ‘what’s it like? You’ve got a son.

What’s it like when he won’t talk to you?’

How do you do it? How do you get on?

How do you care? How do you love this person,

Who says they hate you? How do you care

And love and try to keep on and do it again?

And again? And then again?

She answered very simply: you just do.

But there’s an eighty percent chance of pain.

I thought I’d misheard her. The line

Kept cutting in and out on Skype

Those five or seven or ten thousand miles.

Much of the time it sounded as if she

Was using a bucket for purposes

We couldn’t discuss.

She assured me she wasn’t.

I wasn’t either but there we were.

I didn’t hear you I said

Can you say that again?

Yes, you heard what I said, she said.

There’s an eighty percent chance of pain.

Other people have other friends;

That one is mine.

This isn’t a Hallmark card.

I don’t know the gold standard

Of motherhood. I have no secrets

To impart to you on this

Or pretty much anything else.

My mother’s performance;

If I were a schoolmaster

I would mark it four out of ten.

Must try harder. Attention wanders.

But I would not write ‘see me.’

Not now. Not then.

Other people have other mothers;

This one was mine.

Sometimes I still remember a time

When my head didn’t come up

To the level of a fencepost.

We walked past Star’s field.

Star was a horse with a white blaze

On his forehead

In a village we’d just moved to.

Another move. Another village far from here.

You can’t go there now.

We walked along a path, over a stile made of stone,

One big stone set on edge in the earth

At the end of the path a wooden gate nearest our house

Our new house on the estate that would eat

All of these fields by the time we left again.

Other people have other villages;

This one was mine.

Memories play tricks.

Memories tell lies.

There can’t have been dandelions

And cold at the same time.

Or can there?

Maybe there can.

Some people have other memories;

These are mine.

I remember my mother’s hand

Holding mine.

I remember her sheepskin coat

And the smell of perfume,

An afternoon sunset, Star’s field and dandelions

And for once feeling safe.

Some people have other memories of their mothers

These are mine.

The wind’s blowing up as I walk these fields

Remembering. Clouds are coming

Up over the hill. Thinking back,

Maybe that’s how families are

For everyone. I think it’s pretty much the same

There’s always an eighty percent chance of pain.

This Motherhood Thing

This Motherhood Thing

I’ve known several mothers.

It’s never been my thing.

I don’t know why, other than being male.

You can’t, can you?

You can’t be someone’s mother if you’re not.

Any more than when you meet someone

With children however charming,

However old, however young

You can’t be their father.

You shouldn’t even try.

Some people talk about a sacred trust,

A spirit bond. Some people talk about

The power of pyramids too.

I don’t know how to do this stuff.

Really. I haven’t a clue how it goes.

It never happened for me.

Whether planned or maybe it’s just something

I can’t do. The children thing.

And maybe I shouldn’t.

I remember a woman I still know.

We talk on the phone.

We’ve got to that place where we can

Laugh again, and we do. It’s good.

I like to hear her voice. She has two children.

They did not approve when we met.

They said we’d destroyed their lives;

Both working, one post gap year,

One post grad, now post Phd.

Lives totally not ruined; it’s safe to say that now.

But it was difficult.

He came to visit and smoked (he doesn’t)

And played loud music (he doesn’t)

And stayed up late (that neither)

She ignored all of this. He’s only doing it

To get attention. So don’t, she said.

You don’t reward this behaviour.

I’ll deal with this tomorrow. When it suits me.

You choose your battles with this motherhood thing.

But the noise didn’t suit me then.

I told him something his mother never would

That his comfort and security and well-being,

How he thought about things,

All of this wasn’t actually that interesting,

That his mother’s well-being

And happiness were more important to me

Than him. That he wasn’t so much, in my scheme of things.

We got on after that. It was the first time

This had ever been mooted, that was plain.

It wasn’t something I ever want

To have to say again. It wasn’t motherhood.

But it was true. She mattered to me.

Him not so much. I didn’t see then

How much of a package

Children are. How they’re always there.

On both sides. They can’t stop

Being her children any more than she

Can stop being their mother.

So now when this international lawyer

Is bought fuzzy felt by his mum

And posts the picture on Facebook

I can see these photos and imagine his face

And his voice. It makes me smile,

Four hundred miles away.

I don’t understand how this all works,

This motherhood thing.

It was nice to see it for a while.

Avoiding Stress

It’s been a bit of a week.

It kicked off with someone at my door demanding I don’t do any more stand-up poetry for several reasons:

1) It’s drivel.

2) Nobody likes it.

3) It’s upsetting people and they won’t come to the gigs.

4) It’s obvious who it’s about.

5) It’s stressing that person out.

5) Nobody likes it.

This was all a bit problematic because firstly, of course it’s drivel. I keep saying so.

I DO NOT DO POETRY.

As poetry, my stuff is utter drivel. I agree, like totes.

I don’t know what poetry really is. What I mean is people like Coleridge do poetry. My stuff isn’t like his. But nobody’s ever could be like his. He wasn’t just off his face a lot of the time but he lived in the place I come from and all of the best people I used to know combined those two things too.

After last night’s gig somebody asked me who my influences were, then asked if I minded saying. I can’t think of any possible reason I wouldn’t. I don’t think I’m very much like Adrian Henry, Hugo Williams and John Betjeman. I wish I was, except two of them are dead and the other one isn’t looking very well. But they were the people who I’d like to be like, in writing terms.

Adrian Henry was one of the Liverpool poets. I saw him perform in Bath once and won’t again as he’s dead now. I wish I could write things as good as this:

Love Is

Love is the presents in Christmas shops

Love is when you’re feeling Top of the Pops

Love is what happens when the music stops

Love is.

Drivel, isn’t it? But I like the musing, thinking aloud quality of the repetition. I like the triviality and familiarity of the references to things like Top Of The Pops. I like the banality and the silliness, because sometimes that’s how you feel when you’re in love. Is that poem ‘about’ a specific person? Maybe. Maybe not. We can all recognise the feeling though, without that doing any harm to anybody at all.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn

Summoned By Bells was the first book I bought with my first wages when I went to London. It was ‘about’ a secretly adulterous portly man in a pork pie hat maundering around railway stations and churches, poking around his furniture-making parents’ courtship half a century before. What’s not to like?

At work I sat next to a man who’d been one of the managers of the band Killing Joke. Anyone who thought the band were fascists obviously never swapped sandwiches with Danny. Nice bloke though he was he totally didn’t get Betjeman, couldn’t stand the dum de dum de dum de dee of the rhyming, notwithstanding that Betjeman himself said he was no rhymer, no Milton. But then and now I can’t understand anyone who doesn’t go a bit quiet and reflective with a silly smile half on their lips as they read:

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,

The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,

As I struggle with double-end evening tie,

For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts

And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports

And westering, questioning settles the sun

On your low leaded-window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Bath-path, tie-I, shorts-sports; chase the rhyme John, why don’t you? But at the same time I was arguably lucky enough to grow up in a house like that. I knew girls like that. I never wore a bow-tie for a date, but I did have to learn how to tie one later on. (Tip: tie it around a bannister or a bedpost, then undo it on the adjuster, then put it round your neck. No, don’t thank me, honestly. Yes, I did say have to). And when I read that I can still feel the sunburn on my forearms as I put on a crisp shirt for the evening and wonder how she’s going to be. This evening. Do you think she’ll, you know? if we can find somewhere? There’s a surprising amount of that in Betjeman’s stuff. Joan Hunter Dunn was a real girl who Betjeman had a crush on, (with whom, hem hem) but they were never engaged and they only once went out for lunch. I’m pretty darned sure they never fooled around on a car seat instead of going into the dance they were supposed to be going to. Was the poem ‘about’ the woman whose name he slapped all over it? Well, yes and no. They weren’t engaged. They didn’t go to a dance. And not on a car seat or anywhere else. But she played sports quite a lot and her parents had a house like that.

Unobtainable

I discovered Hugo Williams in a library in Bath but not in the way that Peter Wyngard discovered a police officer in a public lavatory there. When I was supposed to be revising I read No Particular Place To Go over and again (yes I know that’s a phrase I use over and again. It means over and again, you see). That book included the poem about Miss O’Sullivan’s Record Exchange, which is fabulous and was real, (we used to jive in the listening booths when she turned the music up, knowing we wouldn’t buy. It was the best she could do. You couldn’t hear that kind of thing any other way in 1956). But Hugo Williams also writes stuff like this:

Whether it was putting in an extra beat,
or leaving one out, I couldn’t tell.
My heart seemed to have forgotten
everything it ever knew
about timing and co-ordination
in its efforts to get through to someone
on the other side of a wall.
As I lay in bed, I could hear it
hammering away inside my pillow,
being answered now and then
by a distant guitar-note of bedsprings,
pausing for a moment, as if listening,
Then hurrying on as before.

I wonder if Hugo Williams has people knocking on his door saying ‘I know who this is about.’ It’s obviously a very personal poem. Is it about lying in bed listening to the sound of someone you really like shagging someone else in the next room? Maybe. I think so. Some people’s lives are settled and without things like that happening. Mine – well, I’ve known what Hugo Williams was talking about, if he was, even if it was a really long time ago and before I adjusted my attitudes somewhat. Compartmentalising, I think it’s called. Probably. But it could just be about not being able to get to sleep.

He also wrote stuff like this:

I don’t know what to do

As you pass your time

Perfecting the darkness between us.

That was about someone flicking her hair over her eyes looking for split ends instead of looking at him. There has never been a period in history where that’s been a good sign. So I wonder if he ever got email as I did this week, asking him why his stuff is full of self-pity and that wasn’t like him and did he have a split personality or something?

Moving on, as I think we probably should, nothing I write is ‘about’ anyone. Things happen, those things provoke ideas, sometimes the ideas become stuff I write down, sometimes it works as a performance piece and sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s not a documentary.

Like Williams, like Betjeman, like Coleridge, like Henry, which is nowhere near saying my stuff is as good as theirs, the things I write about happen to everybody. It’s not a written record. It isn’t supposed to upset anyone. I hope it doesn’t. It isn’t meant to.

It certainly is time I broadened my scope and varied the themes in the things I write. It’s probably overdue and last week’s visit was a good, if unwelcome, wake-up call to get my finger out and write about some different things. So this week I have. (What Does It Feel Like, Mick? and Nazi Jazz Rules) It’s actually better stuff.

Some people like my stuff. A surprising number, to me, anyway. Not everybody will and that goes for anything, whether it’s pub poetry, as Naomi Jaffa at The Poetry Trust smilingly but somewhat sniffily called it last week, (as in “I don’t do pub poetry, Carl”), politics or pizza. Actually, that’s rubbish. Everyone likes pizza.

To be clear, I absolutely do not want to stress anybody out. If people don’t like my stuff I can live with that. If they don’t want to see me then I’m certainly not going to keep trying to see them.

People get over-excited. But the next time someone comes to my door telling me where I’m allowed to go and what I’m allowed to say then the stress levels involved in finding a police car in your drive and uniformed officers in your living room talking about counselling, procuring, aiding and abetting harassment are quite high, I’m told.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some new stuff to write for a gig for Mother’s Day that people clearly do like, or at least enough to pay me to do it. But with that topic and my family, that’s going to be a bit of a challenge.

Nazi Jazz Rules

I found this on the web tonight, looking for something about Django Reinhardt. I have not altered anything at all in these ten rules. I’m still stunned that this was written.

At Most 10% Syncopation

Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones, so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
Plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
Musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

Reich Gauleiter for the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia signed this day. Genießen Sie den Abend. Guten tag.

Sympathy for the devil

Not Fade Away

Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, a woman he’d been in a relationship with for over a decade, was found hanged on 17th March 2014. The newspaper and media coverage is more inane than usual, maybe because this was a real, non-political tragedy.

It could have been an accident, although it’s hard to see how. The police have ruled out foul play. Nobody else was involved. A terrible, hideous thing happened for reasons that will never be known now, something that will affect the survivors, the other people who knew this poor woman for the rest of their lives.

I trained as a journalist. Friends worked at the BBC. I tried to imagine a newsroom that night, post-Leveson, when a media that had promised to behave itself did what it always does now, looking for a story.

Perhaps I should point out that this is fiction. But I don’t think it’s that far off what can happen.

So What Does It Feel Like, Mick?

So what does it feel like, Mick?

But apart from that Mrs Lincoln,

How did you enjoy the play?

Speak into the microphone, love

Or they won’t hear what you have to say.

Deep breath. Brave smile. Shoulders back, love.

Show ‘em what you got. Nothing to be ashamed of.

Our man in New York, our fearless reporter

Some dork who wasn’t even born the last time

His paper made up comments from a neighbour,

A spokesman, a concerned individual, our source,

An insider at the Palace who cannot be named

For legal reasons before they made their excuses and left

Is spending a good half hour on Google tonight

Digging up dirt on the Street Fighting Man.

Ex-Model Dies Alone in Drugs Hell?

Pity we can’t run it. She hanged herself? No kiss and tell?

Are we sure he didn’t do it? You reckon it’s suicide?

Don’t give me that. What’s he got to hide?

You know, like with Marianne Faithful except

She’s inconveniently alive, even if she is living in Eire.

See if you can pull anything out of Library about her instead.

Rock star swimming pool party tip-off orgy,

Fur coat no underwear and popular confectionery.

Are you kidding me?

That’s what you get from a Journalism MA?

Is that what I pay you for? What did you say?

See son, all that Marianne Faithful stuff

Was back in 1963 or thereabouts. I can’t use it.

That’s no earthly use to me.

And we can’t keep our readers in the dark.

Didn’t she live near Central Park?

Isn’t that where John Lennon got shot?

Haven’t we got any pictures of her and her mates looking hot?

We’ve got no slashing knives, no mystery prowler,

Are you sure there aren’t any pictures of her growing older

Disgracefully? Or looking down her top getting out of a taxi?

Was this some sex thing that all went wrong?

Get me a list of all the Stones songs.

How are you feeling now Mr Jagger?

I don’t want to intrude on your grief

Or nag or anything but our readers have a right to know:

On a scale of one to ten how do you feel? Exactly how low?

Are you sick as a parrot? Or totally gutted?

Are you feeling as if your insides are knotted with grief?

Just tell me then we’ll go away.

‘Cos if you don’t we’ll stay here all day.

Get me a coffee love. And make it strong.

Motivate me to carry on churning this out

For the world to read.

I’m just the editor; it’s not about me.

I reckon it looks like suicide

But we’ll wait for the inquest to say how she died.

If we start it up he’ll close us down.

He’s got enough dosh for the best lawyers in town.

We’ll have all his fanbase jumping up and down

And the advertisers do not like it up ‘em, Mr Mainwearing.

You know the freedom of the Press is sacrosanct to me.

You call that coffee love? I asked for tea.

Nearly fifty, wasn’t she?

Right. Headline: What A Drag It Is Getting Old.

49th Nervous Breakdown. Shattered.

This May Be The Last Time.

I Don’t Know Says Mick. Or just Oh No.

Get on it. We need this by six.

What are we going to say? Run it by Legal anyway

Jagger’s got enough money to stitch us up

Like a kipper if he feels like it.

What have we got? Come on. Give me ideas.

“Mick Jagger is struggling to understand

The death of his girlfriend.”

Ok, Pamela Stephenson can write something

About typical man coming to terms with grief.

“We spent many wonderful years together

And had made a great life for ourselves.

The Rolling Stones have cancelled

The first date of their tour.”

Is that all we’ve got? Isn’t there any more?

“I have been touched by the tributes paid. And also

The personal messages of support I have received.

I will never forget her.”

You see what he’s doing, giving us crap copy

We could have done ourselves?

What a git. It’s like we’ve never even met her.

Which we haven’t, but our music industry insider

Hasn’t come up with anything either. Thank-you Simon.

She was the worst kind of person so far as we can tell:

Honest, clean, nice and in a relationship

With someone famous. Sod that.

What the hell do you think you’re paid for

If you can’t find anything swept behind the door?

If we can’t call her some kind of name Legal will approve?

And then we can all go home and ignore the fact

That a real person we’ve got no dirt on died

And in a luxury hotel tonight with an untouched drink

At his side a man who everyone thinks they know

Locked the door and switched the phone off,

Got undressed, showered, did his teeth,

Poured another massive Scotch and didn’t even sip,

Took out another cigarette and couldn’t get it lit,

But lay down on his bed,

This man without a bride,

Switched off the light

Alone for once

And cried.

So what does it feel like, Mick?

Truth, Licence & Total Fiction

A tortured course

I went to this wedding once, like you do. It was alright. The groom was a mate and the bride looked pretty fit in that dress. We all said in the car-park. Lucky bloke. So anyway, I’d gone out for a smoke in the churchyard just before the end of it and this old bloke out there started on about how he’d been in the navy.

Sam Coleridge. The coolest droog that ever lived in the West Country. Probably. — Coleridge. Almost too cool to read at school.

And that was the thing. He wouldn’t stop talking.

He was going on about how they were on this ship somewhere it was really cold, up in the Artic or somewhere, when this massive bird flew over and landed on this ship he was on and they give it some chips. Then it started coming back for more chips all the time until he was a bit pissed one day, this old bloke and he shot it. Then all this bad stuff kicked off on the ship and all his mates blamed him for killing the albatross and he had to wear it round his neck for I don’t know, years. Well, months then. I couldn’t really follow it by then, it all got weird. I reckon he was on something. He didn’t talk like he was right in the head. But the way he said it all, I had to listen to the end. It didn’t make sense, all of it, but it was the way he said it. It was like I’d had a bang on the head or something when he’d finished.

Except it didn’t happen

Recognise the plot? It’s long-term substance abuser with addiction issues Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner. The voice is similar to the way people spoke in the same area Colerdidge lived but when I was growing up there. Similar to but different. As Marlowe and Pinter nearly said, the past is another country and besides, it’s all made up.

Facts get blurred in fiction. Or to un-confuse that thought, when you write stuff you take ideas, and being human and being lazy everyone I’ve ever heard of starts off writing about something that happened to them. Then they alter it. The thing that really happened could be anything, a major thing in your life like a car-crash or your parents’ death, or remembering utterly trivial, like tasting the madeleine biscuits that were the key to Proust’s past, or seeing a child’s footprints in the snow one day.

Because it’s fiction

Some people restore old cars. Years ago there was a film called Two Lane Blacktop. Two long-haired hippie weirdo freaks as they used to be called, have this old 1955 Chevrolet they stripped-down and souped-up and they go around the country doing illegal races for money. Then they meet this girl, like you do. She sleeps with one of them. But then the other one fancies her a bit but nothing really happens but then they meet this older bloke and get in a bet with him about whose car is fastest and she gets in his car and the race becomes not just about the money or cars. Sort of. Maybe. Or it could be about Vietnam in some unexplained way, the way you have to say every American film of the 1970s was.

Fair turned moi 'ead it did, an' all like. — The car and sort-of-star in Two Lane Blacktop. Fair turned moi ‘ead it did an’ all like, that film did. In my experience her expression simply means ‘my jeans are much too tight.’

Whatever. As some people clearly get confused about fact and fiction I’ll let you into a secret. Although that might really have happened and I’ve no evidence one way or the other, here’s a total 100% fact. It didn’t happen to Will Cory who wrote the film and got $100,000 for doing it, or the actors in it. Or that way. Or then. If it happened at all. The film was made in 1971. Back in the 1960s Will Cory had travelled across America. Yes, people really did wear denim shirts without being ironic. And *gasp* sometimes they even went to bed with each other without being married and *faint* sometimes someone else would have liked to do that with one of the people involved and didn’t know exactly how to say that. I know! Who’d have thought it? But it still didn’t really happen. Because it’s a film. Are you getting the hang of this yet?

Still confused? Ok. Again in the 1950s a company called Plymouth made a car called the Fury. Because they did. In America. Anyway, this car’s about 20 years old when this kid at school bought it to do up, except the more involved he gets with the car it’s as if it changes him. As he repairs the old car until it looks like new this kid becomes withdrawn, humourless and cynical, but at the same time more confident and self-assured. But that’s quite enough about me. Oh look! See what I did there?

That’s the basic plot of Steven King’s book/film/bank balance adjuster Christine. Two boys like the same girl at school. One of them gets this old car. Except the car is an elemental that kills people when nobody’s driving it and I’ve said too much already. Good film. Except that didn’t happen either.

Once he had some money Steven King liked to restore old cars, like the 1958 Plymouth Fury in the film. Or not like. The real 1958 Fury was only made in white, not red. The one in the book had four doors, the one in the film and the real one only two. One day Mr King had a thought. What if the milometer ran backwards, the way everyone used to say car dealers wound it back to make it look newer? What if that really happened? What if there’s this ghost or evil spirit in the car and as the milometer runs backwards it really does get new again?

Really good. Except it isn't true. — Really good. Except it isn’t true.

Sorry, but I’m going to have to spoil it all now. That never really happened either. Except bits of it did.

Here’s the clue. Steven King probably did stand there with a busted old milometer and wound it back just for a laugh before he had a good look at how it fitted back in and ordered a new one from the parts catalogue. Almost certainly. Totally certainly, his car didn’t repair itself while he did it.

So is Christine ‘about’ Steven King’s restoration project? Is Two Lane Blacktop ‘about’ Will Cory’s road trip? Is Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner ‘about’ having your Saturday ruined when you thought you were going for a serious drink with your mates and end-up talking to this old bloke about albatrosses?

Bits. Sort of. But not really. From an idea. From something that did really happen, but not the way it got written, because writing it does what writing always does, it changes the real into the unreal, for effect, for a story, for fun.

So next time anyone has a couple of drinks after work and comes to my door demanding I don’t do any more poetry because they know who it’s about and they’re watching me in future, or someone else asks me online why a poem shows a me full of self-pity and how come as that’s not the me they know and have I got a split personality or something, allow me to commend to you Two Lane Blacktop, Christine and The Ancient Mariner. All based on things that really did happen. A bit. But whisper who dares as Christopher Robin put it: not exactly the way they came out when they were written.

Sorry to have to break it to you. It’s like Father Christmas. But that’s why fiction exists, to make real life more interesting. To parabel-ise if that’s a thing. To entertain. But fiction isn’t fact. Poetry isn’t a documentary. It’s about themes, the sorts of things that happen to everybody, that people recognise, which is why people can relate to them. What it isn’t is an authentic record. Actors, someone reading aloud, didn’t really have those things happen. Things are either fiction or they are not. And when you’re dealing with life, separating fact and fiction is important.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

The Marine, whose eye is bright,

Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone: and now the Wedding Guest

Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man,

He rose the morrow morn.

Postscript

And if you’re wondering why that all seems a bit familiar, it might be that this is that you’re thinking of:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

All Things Bright is probably the best remembered of Mrs Alexander’s 1848 Hymns For Little Children, published considerably after The Ancient Mariner and Mrs Alexander probably wouldn’t thank you for saying she nicked the idea from mostly out-of-his-head-but-so-cool-with-it Coleridge. But you can see the obvious influence. But which one, if any, is true?

Another day, another passive aggressive episode

I wrote this on a garage forecourt after something I’d heard in a pub the night before. It made me really quite peeved, considering.

I’d been listening to Murray Lachlan Young (who in one of those Suffolk things you get around here I’ve never met but is marrying the daughter of someone I know) but it’s possible this owes rather more to Pam Eyres than I’d really like to admit to. John Betjeman if he was born 50 years later maybe. I’d be happy with that.

The person who probably did more to get me writing again than anyone phoned me up last night, out of the blue.

‘I’ve seen your poetry on Facebook.’

Oh, I said. Did you like it?

‘It’s shite. You know that anyway.’

Well, it’s not exactly Shakespeare, I agree. I think they call it tough love. Or something. So without further ado, a not-at-all passive aggressive everyday story of middle-class country folk. Again.

Nobody's house that I know, just to be clear. — Nobody’s house that I know, just to be clear.

Please Don’t Slag Me Off To Your Cleaner

If you cut me do I not bleed?

If you bleed me do I not cry?

If you hurt me do I not write poetry?

What did you think I would do?

Make something on my iPhone

And upload it to YouTube?

At my age? And anyway it’s all

Carefully anonymised

As we tacitly agreed

Except I’m hearing stuff

Coming back about me.

So I don’t think writing poetry

Is really any meaner than you

Bitching on about me to your cleaner

And yes, I heard about that too.

I went to the pub you used to go to;

The one you won’t visit now in case I’m there

And had a chat with people you didn’t know I knew

You see? So if you’re going public

It’ll get back to me and I thought we’d agreed

That wasn’t the way it was going to be.

That isn’t the sort of thing

People like us do, me and you.

So I want you to listen to this, please:

While I say look, I don’t understand,

Let alone really know why it ended

But then, I’m a man,

But we made an agreement;

What we’d said that night was true;

Or I meant what I said.

I’m not sure about you, these days.

So you can moan about me:

I’m not stitching-up you.

And anyway it was only that one time

On the stairs. She was cleaning the shower

I was taking some air and I’d really forgotten

There was anyone there.

I mean really it wasn’t even a misdemeanour,

So please don’t keep slagging me off to your cleaner.

And I’ve only seen her once or twice since then anyway.

She’d been doing your shower.

I’d been washing my hair.

There really wasn’t anything happening there

And despite what you thought I wasn’t there for the scenery

So please don’t keep going on about me to your cleaner.

It’s not as if we were doing anything obscene

Or anything. Really.

And obviously I fully realise

That pretty soon now it’s all going to polarise,

Time to start dripping selected juicy lies,

The friends of the groom and the friends of the bride,

We’re all choosing weapons so pick your side now

Between ‘What a bastard!’ and ‘Stupid cow!’

But I can remember when our grass was greener

So please, please, don’t slag me off to your cleaner.

(c) Carl Bennett 2014

And no, of course I didn’t feel up someone’s cleaner while I was staying at their house. It’s just a poem. Sort of.

South Tower

One Saturday lunchtime last October I went to the Suffolk Arts Club. Because that’s what I’m like. Because that’s what I do.

There was an art event going on in the tower, right up at the top in a little wooden cell you have to climb up into, literally, swinging on wooden hand-holds if you didn’t want to fall to what would very likely be your death on the concrete floor twenty feet below. Someone asked me if I was going to go and contribute something and I got it in my head that art meant painting and painting meant poster paints and probably because it was at the seaside I thought of blue paint, the childhood deep blue of the sea, the blue of the sky back then.

It was October though and the wind was gusting and the sky was grey. I was half-way coming out of a massively upsetting time of my life and trying to learn not to force my pre-conceptions onto events and people. When I swung up into the wooden tower there were no paints. But there was a notebook on a small table underneath the window. So I wrote this.

South Tower, Aldeburgh

I was to put my hand here.

The fingers, knuckles and nails

Coloured blue, poster paint

Flaking from my skin,

Sloughed off. Instead

I listen to the wind,

The sound inside my mind

And try to listen to my heart.

Blue hands. Grey sky.

No poster paints outside my expectations.

Carl Bennett 2013