Carl Bennett – Page 16 – Writer-insighter

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.

They called it Martlesham

I came within thinking distance of dying today. As in thinking ‘hmm, this is a distinct possibility. Glad I made a bail-out plan. Now let’s see if it works.’

Boat stuff. I had two things to do, and only took oooh, most of the day to mostly do one and half-do the other. When I checked the boat yesterday I found water in the bilge -about a foot of it. Nothing that hasn’t been there before and rainwater rather than river water, which is good because the leaking through the hull has stopped, but bad because the roof leak hasn’t gone away. Whoever put the grab rails and winding blocks and all the other deck furniture on the the coachroof (no, I don’t know why it’s called that either. Cabin roof. Better, isn’t it?) used screws that went all the way through. So does the water when it rains. Well done, that man.

That should have been easy. Take out the old pump and float switch and put new ones in. Would have been one answer, but being thrifty and prudent I had to convince myself they were both irredeemably shagged, so had to work out which wire fed which, and of course they’re under water so I couldn’t see what colour they were until I thought just chop them out and replace anyway. Which I did. And found, of course, that the exit hose wouldn’t fit the new pump and neither would the adapter. It took over an hour to think of how to fix this. Answer 1 – Gaffa tape was rejected in favour of Answer 2 = superglue. Eventually.

Then the new pump stopped working. For reasons unknown. I think I tripped the push button cut-out when I shorted everything. Because water. There don’t seem to be any actual fuses, just this push button thing. Worst case, 12 volt shock. I thought that wouldn’t kill me but I didn’t get a shock anyway, somewhat surprisingly.

Task two was to go onto the river bed and dig a hole around the rudder. It’s a drying berth. That means when the tide is out – and there’s around 4 metres of tide to go out – the boat sits on the mud of the river bed. Because the Folkboat rudder is where it is and the shape it is, it dug itself a hole in the mud, four and a half tons of boat settled on it and in a month it snapped the tiller.

I made a new one, but that month has also warped the rudder to one side. Instead of lashing the tiller straight at the next high tide, thinking what’s done is done and leaving it be I went over the side. But I wasn’t entirely stupid. For once.

I put the boarding ladder over the side first. I wore waders. I considered carrying a whistle and wearing a lifejacket. And didn’t do either. More to the point, I tied not one but two lines to the boat and to the jetty and draped them where I could get at them if I sank into the mud.

I sank into the mud.

But that’s ok, I thought, because I’ve got waders on, and the boarding ladder, and these two ropes. Which was all true, except I was up to my left knee and past my right knee and I couldn’t actually get out. Every time I got a leg a little bit higher the other leg sank deeper. It went on for a bit. Getting deeper. People had to live like this for four years in Flanders. Usually they did it for two weeks at a time or until they got shot or exploded. But frankly, I wasn’t thinking about them today. And that’s not just all me, me, me. This was a bit serious.

The only way out was to jettison the waders and climb back up the ladder, pouring sweat, having achieved nothing at all apart from nothing. And realising how you could actually get a heart attack doing stuff like this, because it was massively, massively draining and I couldn’t and still can’t quite work out why. But it was. I could feel my breath getting short doing it. Four hours later I ache pretty much all over, even after a hot shower.

But I got out. I didn’t die, from drowning or a heart attack. I found almost a metre of plywood in the bow I’d put there for General Purposes and these definitely were. I dropped it over the side near the boarding ladder and climbed down again, in the wellies I’d stupidly forgotten were in the starboard locker anyway and stood on the plywood to recover the waders, only getting 90% muddy in the process. I tried to dig the mud out from around the rudder but water kept flowing into the hole even though it was pretty much Low Water. I couldn’t see where I was digging and each shovel full was heavy as a very heavy thing and I thought: ‘Actually, this is stupid.’

And it was. I gave up. It took another hour to get all the mud off the waders and the ladder and the plywood and the ropes and me and just about everything I could see, apart from the swan I was worried was going to attack me when it came over to where the hose was. I was hit by a swan once when I was a boy. I literally didn’t see it coming until it did. It didn’t break my arm as advertised, but it wasn’t fun.

I wasn’t looking forward to a renactment today. But this was an old swan and a swan well used to people as it lives in the boatyard and it doesn’t bother the boatyard people and we try not to bother it, moving slowly and not towards it. Turned out it was just thirsty and wanted a drink from the puddle of water spilling off the muddy ladder, less than three feet from me.

I got the pump and the float switch mostly wired up, even though I ran out of rubbish connectors and had to Manfix it with twists and insulating tape. The push-button cut-out didn’t. The solar charger does. I’m going back tomorrow to stow the hopefully dried-out ladder and lines and lash the tiller again, and make sure everything’s ok. Which it will be. Just so long as I don’t go walking on the river bed again. There’s no future in it.

In plain sight

Once upon a time, a lot of East Anglia was like this. As far inland as Cambridge, an hour’s drive from the coast certainly was. You could get a boat up there from the sea. You can still get sizeable boats into Norwich, or at least as sizeable as 151-foot long Swedish gunboats, like the one the Sea Scouts use there. No, of course not as a gunboat. Not even in Norfolk.

It’s not so much a different world as a forgotten one. The water speared deep into the land. It still does, but we can’t seem to remember.

The biggest Saxon church I ever saw. — The biggest Saxon church I’ve seen. In the Peterborough diocese. Hereward probably knew it.

But people did. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, we’re told that pretty much that was that. Except it wasn’t. In February 1067, dead king Harold’s mother lead a revolt in the West Country. Then there was a revolt in Northumberland, lead by Morcar, Earl of one of the four Saxon kingdoms. That failed too. Unlike Harold’s mother, Morcar got away. He came down south and around 1070 joined up with the last English leader, Hereward. Just ten miles north of Cambridge they hid in the marshes surrounding the Isle of Ely.

A man called Belsar was given the job of fixing Hereward once and for all. He lead his men to what was probably a much older camp on the edge of the marsh commanding a track to the Isle itself. Being Norman and convinced of the supremacy of shock and awe tactics he built a wooden causeway across the marsh to stage a direct frontal assault on the last of England. And as often happens with shock and awe assaults, things went a bit differently to the plan. If there was one.

It sank. The weight of the assault force sank the causeway. There wasn’t anywhere to go. The men on it couldn’t escape sideways because they needed the causeway across the marsh in the first place. But it was sinking. They died. Personally, I think the causeway might have had some help in sinking from Hereward and his men. But I don’t know.

I found it and walked the causeway last week. The fen was drained back in the 1600-somethings and there isn’t any marsh there any more. There isn’t any malaria now either, which is nice.

I was trying to feel some of the atmosphere of the watery fens. The snag was I was at least three hundred years too late. The track across what definitely wasn’t marsh any more was just another drove road, the kind of boring nothing-made-of-mud I remembered from childhood holidays on the Somerset Levels. Some kids got to go to Spain. We got Congresbury. It wasn’t the same, really.

I dumped the car what I hoped was far enough away from the four people living in a caravan surrounded by their own crushed plastic bottles and the ashes of their fires and their refuse in bin bags and carpet offcuts used to smooth out the barbed wire fence keeping people out of farmland around Belsar’s camp. I walked past the four separate fly tipping dumps in what for two thousand years was a major arterial route through this part of the country, the most direct route from Cambridge to Ely, where the monks lived. Where Hereward hid out. Where his relation, the king of Denmark, came over by boat to help out, and while he was there, to help himself to the loot from the sacking of the abbey at Peterborough.

Past the 1960s farmhouse at the end of a metalled road cutting through Althred’s Causeway. Out onto the flatlands again, putting up a heron that lumbered into the sky like the awkward little dinosaur it was and forever is. All the way across the bone dry, drained, boring track. Everywhere was flat. Until you start to notice the places that must have been islands in the marsh, little places mostly under an acre that stand ooh, some of them six or seven feet above the fields around them. And you wonder what was there. Or when.

Because what definitely happened is that after the wooden causeway sank, Belsar’s, or maybe Belasius’s, death squad got hold of a witch. They built a wooden tower and stuck her in it with orders to scream curses at Hereward. I mean, hey, we’ve all been on the end of that. Some of us, anyway.

Hereward sneaked through the marsh and not being someone who appreciated women going on and on and on at him at volume, set light to the tower before he disappeared back into the marsh.

The atmosphere had changed. It was six or seven miles out across the moor to the Isle of Ely. I met a huge dog but more interestingly, I learned something I knew long ago, how hard it is to see someone who doesn’t move. Two boats came along as I was crossing the river. I just kept still, in plain sight. Not a nod, a wave, not a hint that they knew I was there. An old lesson other people practised at that place, almost a thousand years ago.

The Wake

Unsurprisingly, I had an argument on Facebook with a ridiculous pro-Brexit racist who sincerely believed that a) there was such a thing as ‘pure English’ and b) that Anglo in Anglo-Saxon meant English, rather than Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and Franks. Just about anybody with a boat and an axe, really. And predominantly from the Low Countries, before they were called that themselves.

Just as a little history lesson, for those who bafflingly don’t know, if there was any such thing as ‘pure’ English – actually no.

You can’t even start from there. If there was something English then there would have to be an England, and until after the Romans, who left about 400AD, there wasn’t a single kingdom. There wasn’t until only a short while before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Danes, or Vikings, if you prefer, had invaded whenever they felt like it since about 800AD. They even invaded the same week as the Normans and again just afterwards.

In 865 they landed in East Anglia to take the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia, West Sussex, Northumbria and East Anglia. In 1013 Aethelread the Unready was defeated by Sweyne Forkbeard. Not the most notably English name, not least as he was Danish. Sweyne died in 1014, but Canute got his throne back in 1016. He was Danish, too.

Just fifty years before the obviously French Normans obliterated the Anglo-Saxon world, it was already obliterated. Except even the Normans weren’t really Norman. They were Danes too, who’d got there just fifty years before. And it wasn’t just East Anglia. The Danes got as far as Shropshire. Which in England is pretty much as far as there is to go. They weren’t kicked out of Scotland until 1263. Even then they had to be bought off.

Since then we had the Welsh Tudors, Plantagenets I know almost nothing about and William and Mary who were Dutch, long before the current crop of Saxe-Coburg Gothas. From Germany. Since George I, who died without bothering to learn any English, because he was the king anyway, so who cares?

It’s not exactly ‘pure,’ Englishness. It used to stand, ideally, for tolerance. And cricket, of course, the only professional sport where you can drink tea during the match as a player, not just as a spectator. And church clocks and bells and mists and mellow fruitfulness. And honey still for tea, obviously. But none of it pure, apart from the honey, in any sense that would appeal to people who talk about these things usually without being able to state with any certainty who their own father was.

And the wake? Not a wake for those things. The wake meant ‘the watchful.’ Hereward, our very own East Anglian rebel, the anti-Norman freedom fighter, the man who shares Robin Hood’s stories for the very good reason that Robin Hood’s stories were adapted from the tales of Hereward, a hundred years earlier.

Unlike Robin, Hereward was very much a real person, documented in three separate Anglo-Saxon sources including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which isn’t of course to be confused with the Bath Evening Chronicle, nor even the Western Daily Press.

Hereward’s story is something I’m working on now. Someone had said wouldn’t it be great if there was an English Game of Thrones? And even better if it was in East Anglia. And of course, there was. Just that most people have never heard of him. I can’t work out why. But then, just lately facts about what it is to be British have become much less important than fantasies. And we’ve all had enough of experts now.

Draft One was done in a week, with 70 pages down. It was ok in parts but it wasn’t doing all the things it needed to do. So I’ve got to do it again. Bits are salvageable, but not many. And I am very, very tired. Not of doing this, but because of this. So for tonight at least, I think I need to sleep. Early, deep and long.

Third Childhood

I claimed my name was Fred and that I was a lorry driver. Neither of these things were true. I was four years old at the time.

Fine. When you're six. — Fine. When you’re six.

I also claimed to be a cowboy, something that fascinated me up until the time I saw real cowboys in the supermarket shopping for their supper instead of hunting antelope where the buffalo roamed. I lived in Aspen at the time. But I’d long since stopped pretending to be a cowboy. Not least as affecting a huge Western moustache and wearing cutaway leather chaps had connotations that could clear a dance-floor in seconds by then.

I did, admittedly, like listening to ELO’s Wild West Hero. And for that matter, Elton John’s even older Roy Rodgers. There was something I could relate to, living in the West Country that wasn’t like that imagined Wild West country at all. Where I lived there weren’t any deer, or at least not until you got out onto Salisbury Plain. There were a few there, obviously. But the buffalo left about 300,000 years before.

Something about Reg Dwight, who got about as far west as Rickmansworth before he got famous, something about that whole untamed praries thing echoed in my head. But I stopped dressing-up as a cowboy when I was about six years old. Maybe before.

I’ve only once dressed up as a footballer, and that was for a fancy dress party. Well, a murder mystery party thing, anyway. And thankfully, no photos survive.

I don’t get football. I don’t understand why it’s more important to know how many goals England won against West Germany in 1966 than to know what the EU is before you vote to leave it, or whether West Bromwich Albion is even a thing now, let alone Hamilton Academicals. I’ve been to Hamilton. It’s not, very.

My father insisted on the nearest we ever got to a religious silence while the football pool results were read out on TV on Saturdays, after we’d had to watch some utterly unintelligible football match commented on by a man screaming ‘he shoots, he scores’ and getting paid for it. I couldn’t understand horse racing commentary either, which was much the same thing. Shouty. Didn’t like.

I didn’t like books like Skins. I didn’t like the way that football violence and racism and abuse were all neatly airbrushed out, as soon as the mega money moved in and Pavarotti started singing about a make of Japanese car. All the boot boy casuals aggro hadn’t gone away. But it was suddenly Very Rude to mention it.

I didn’t like Alf Garnett, long before he was adopted as a candidate for Britain’s patron saint. I didn’t like living near the Arsenal ground, the old one, notwithstanding that it looked like something that Mussolini would have been pleased with.

OK, it was handy being able to blame football fans when I got a new convertible from the company I worked for, didn’t know how to get the roof up, stood on the back seat and pulled it until it all broke (oh I was younger, alright? I’m not like that now.). But.

You couldn’t park on a Saturday and if you did you couldn’t get back before six. And forget going to the shops or the Tube on match days. Don’t get me wrong. If people want to play football, great. If they want to watch it, I don’t understand that but fine, it’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t and don’t understand why it’s ok for that to inconvenience all the people not doing that. I said it’s nothing to do with me. I’m fine with keeping it that way.

But most of all, I don’t understand why adults, people with children, people allowed to vote, dress themselves (presumably) up like chubby toddlers to watch millionaires kicking a ball around. I was in Ipswich the other night. Some football match was on then, presumably. At least, men in their forties, fifties and even sixties had poured themselves into Portman Road’s finest XXXL this year’s strip and were walking around the town centre and nobody was sectioning them.

It baffles me. It didn’t used to happen. If senilityisthe seocnd childhood, these days there also has to be a third one, one where grown men raid the dressing-up box and pretend to be Wayne Rooney, IN PUBLIC. Walking down the High Street. At least the equally risible 50-somethings poured into wetsuits sailing plastic tea-trays at the yacht club have the decency not to waddle about looking like something Greenpeace couldn’t get back into the water. And guys, it may be Olympic year but trust me, they aren’t going to pick you. No, seriously. Especially not with that deeply unfashionable fungal infection that won’t go away because of you wearing wet neoprene shoes for eight hours on Saturdays.

But dressing up as a football player when you don’t? Really? As an adult? Maybe I should dig out my cowboy hat after all. Turn on the TV. Shut out the lights. And act my shoe-size, not my age. Take it away, Reg.

Maybe it’s me

I learned to read a long time ago, but not as long ago as the people who were teaching me to read. Not my parents, or Sunday school, or teachers at school. I mean the man – and I think it must have been a man – who wrote the books I learned to read on.

retro

It puzzled me all through my 20s and more, why nobody else had the same books at school. For French we had the Bertillon family, three children called Marie-Claude and Philippe at Alain, because Mme Bertillon, apart from epitomising understated Parisian chic (and how did that work? Her husband worked at the airport, for heaven’s sake) was undoubtedly Catholic, like Ken Leary, like the kids who went to The Other School, St Augustine’s. Which was never talked about, being about 400 yards away. Monsieur Bertillon was a douanier, the guy who asks if you’ve packed your own suitcase, out at Orly, commuting by motobycyclette. Moped then, before FS1Es were even a twinkle in a designer’s eye.

Because while everyone else in the UK learned to read on Janet and John, I got Dick and Dora. Who nobody’s ever heard of, except it seems, in Australia. Possibly because one internet source tells me Dick and Dora were replaced in schools in 1949, which isn’t when I went to school, but explains quite a lot about my world view.

A bit like the time I spent half an hour on a vicious argument in the street with a girl who insisted we’d been to a club last week, but the aircraft hanger with 200 TV sets nailed to the wall where we had to drink warm beer out of plastic glasses sitting in total isolation while our ears bled to Tainted Love (which couldn’t have had any bearing on our relationship whatsoever) wasn’t anything like a proper nightclub, or at least the Rick’s Bar that was in my head with that label.

I blame Dick and Dora. Actually, I don’t, because they taught me right from wrong.

Right is Aga cookers in warm, cosy, bright, welcoming kitchens. Right is where you’re always accepted and adults are there to help. Right is umbrellas blowing inside out in November and men’s hats blowing off in March, and April showers and daffodils and supper is always waiting for you. Right is proper artwork and hardbound covers and rabbits and imaginary elephants in parks devoid of syringes and proper wooden benches and balls and Airedale terriers and cats called Fluff. And cars with running boards. And cigarettes. And real men wore silk scarves.

I’ve spent years wondering when all this is going to actually happen. I was coming to the conclusion that it actually might possibly not until I did some teaching at summer school and found myself making a mask of a horse’s head using a badminton racket (ha! Ingenious, non? Obviously it wasn’t my idea), A4 paper, some crayons, sissors and a well-known brand of glue. I had a helper, naturally. She was 11 and advised on the colouring, and whether the bridle should be drawn on or applique paper. She thought drawn on was better, despite her success with the brown blaze on the horse’s nose and the eyes, chiefly, I suspect because she thought I was doing too much of it and wanted a go herself.

And suddenly, it really was Dick and Dora world. It was sunny outside. We were making something people wanted, something that made people happy. We were totally absorbed in it. We made something, literally, out of nothing. A pretend world, where horses really are made of paper and badminton racquets. Or at least, enough so that when they saw our horse, pretty much everyone smiled that day. And I smiled too, at what I didn’t know. But I think it was the fact that finally, I’m an adult. And I was helping.

A walk in the woods

Last week my arduous afternoons consisted of sitting reading a book under the shade of a tree, on the mounting block in a riding school yard while ‘my’ kids, the best in the whole school, had their three-hour riding lesson. It was a tough job, but hey, somebody had to do it.

I don’t ride. Last time I did I ended up in Charing Cross Hospital with concussion, whiplash and third-degree burns, which sounds like a busy day at the circus but was a more mundane reaction to riding while drunk in the sun and not turning left when the horse did. But I was made to ride when I was a kid. I didn’t want to. It was that or elocution lessons. You think I’m joking.

Apparently, I was supposed to be grateful I had riding lessons. Most kids didn’t. And if I didn’t like them, if I didn’t like the feel of soaking wet jeans chafing my legs against a borrowed saddle, if I didn’t like bored horses stepping on me, if I didn’t like getting asthma so that eventually I was allowed to stop when an hour on a horse meant a day in bed, then I was just ungrateful

Every single word of this is true. But last week I discovered that while I still don’t really have any great desire to go riding as opposed to looking good on a horse, I also don’t have asthma, or any allergic reaction to horses, dung, straw, hay or stables. Which came as some considerable and pleasant surprise. Maybe I grew out of it. And maybe it was nothing to do with the horses at all, but no matter. It’s gone. What hadn’t gone was my occasional not hearing people properly, assuming I have and over-reacting in a way that makes Clive Dun’s Corporal Jones look like a study in under-acting.

Teaching English, I’d tried showing them You Tube clips of Jones screaming ‘Don’t Panic!” to reassure them about the exams. I’d tried showing them ‘Allo Allo’s Officer Crabtree, to show the importance of proper pronunciation, but that didn’t work at all.

They didn’t get it. But they were laughing?

“Yes, we were laughing because you were laughing.”

Which was a good lesson in itself, although more for me than them.

The biggest Utterly WHAT Did You Say? came at the stables. We were walking back from the jumps at the end of the lesson when I asked one of the older girls, not the one who rode like a centaur, the gymnast, my favourite.

Nor her mate who rode like an Apache, dark and wild. No. This one was probably about Number Three in the ranks of Carl’s Cavalry. I asked how her ride had been but I wasn’t ready for her answer.

Apparently, her arse was afraid.

Sorry?

She said it again.

In France they call them arses, apparently... — In France they call them arses, apparently…

Where the utter blinking flip did she get phrases like that from? Who’d told her this was an appropriate thing to say? What on earth had given her the idea that this was an acceptable response when her English teacher was asking her a question? Hmm? Well? I’ve got all day. It’s your own time your wasting (Trad. Arr. All Teachers Ever Until They Get A Grip And Stop It).

Which possibly predictably produced instant utter bewilderment. Is it not the right word? But it is?

No, it certainly is not.

But – this is, is it not, my arse? She nodded at the huge four-legged black animal walking amiably next to her.

Well, probably obviously to you, dear reader, but not to me walking down a dusty track in the woods surrounded apparently by arses, it wasn’t what she was saying. Or rather it was, but not what she thought she was saying. Because she was French. And the ‘ash’ sound (no it is NOT, it’s aitch! As in hotel! For heaven’s sake!) isn’t one that comes naturally if you don’t have it in your head. And the vowel sound O comes out as A, too. So when the poor bewildered girl told me about her horse being scared of a jump it sounded as if she was saying something completely different.

Next day’s punishment was reciting the words on the board:

I held the horribly hot hideous horse’s hoof in my hand.

They all did it. For up to ten minutes afterwards. Then it was back to normal. And having to remember that what people say is not always what they mean. Especially when they didn’t say what you thought they said. Just like the time I told them:

Oui, j’adore les chevaux aussi. Mais c’est n’est–ce pas possible pour a manger le tout chose.

It was in Norway. It would have been rude not to. And like a steak, since you ask.