Author: Carl Bennett

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.


Radio On (1979) by BFIfilms

Heroes had been the anthem for a time in Bristol and Bath, a time of leather jackets and silk scarves and patchouli and cowboy boots on Park Road, hanging around the record stores and bookshops, living our preposterously tamely genteel version of street-life that was unimaginably alien to parents brought up on rationing. Our rebellion was making sure all our girlfriends were on the pill. That’s how wild we were. You think I’m joking.

This was still a time when I went to the doctor one day to discuss the pros and cons of this policy with my family doctor, a man so cool he hand-rolled liquorice papers in the surgery while telling you not to smoke. He didn’t approve of our practice. It wasn’t the idea of shovelling hormones into people whose hormones were all over the place that he objected to. Just that when, as he put it, the word got around that a pretty young girl (he had that kind of voice, the kind of voice you could say that with, then) was on the pill it was people like me that were the problem. Me? You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.

You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.

And all the while we could be heroes. And nothing could keep us together. And then nothing much that I listened to from David Bowie until Heathen, twenty? thirty years later? I liked that. Then nothing for another decade until the desolate survivor-story of Where Are We Now.  I haven’t heard Blackstar. Not except the Radiohead version, the one that like so much of Bowie’s stuff, takes me back to Radio On and Bristol and Bath and silk scarves and girls with curled hair and Afghan coats. Cold cheeks and warm lips. The flash of white teeth bared in a smile in street light. Blame it on the black star. Blame it on the satellite that takes him home.

 

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Faking it

polis

A woman in Wiltshire has just had her car stopped by a fake police car. as Morcheeba used to sing back when I was cool, who can you trust?

The odd thing, the thing about being older, is that I remember this happening before. Wiltshire isn’t exactly a crime hotspot. So two fake police car incidents made me think a bit. The one I remember was in Trowbridge. A real policeman walked over to a police van to ask the driver something and realised he wasn’t talking to anyone he knew from Trowbrodge police station. Someone had faked up a police van and got their fun just driving around pretending to be in the police. They’d never stopped anyone, or gained anything by it. They just liked playing at being a policeman.

In a world where grown adults pay hundreds of pounds to squeeze 18stone into football kit to go to watch a game, maybe that’s not so odd at all, really. Me, I’d have chosen a cowboy outfit. But Trowbridge was always odd. A couple of years after the fake police car another van got someone arrested. It was camouflage. It belonged to whoever had taken over the old army-surplus shop that sold sand-coloured canvas haversacks and Canadian army greatcoats for sixth formers, back when that was what sixth formers wore. As a tip, maybe it’s best if you do break in to the army gun room and steal a Sterling machine pistol, or know who did, it might be better to keep a lower profile than cruising around town looking like you’re auditioning for The A Team. As I said, a strange place, Wiltshire.

 

 

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Share if you don’t care

I’ve used Facebook too much. There, I’ve said it now, out of the closet, loud and proud. I am what I am. Someone who thinks Facebook if it isn’t bona fide actually evil, certainly is something that allows people to wallow in stupid, spread it around and smear it up the walls. Especially when it comes to religion.

 

Look, Arthur, I need the Grail back. It was a loan. You know full well it was only a loan.
Look Arthur, open this door. I need the Grail back now. It was a loan. Two millenia you’ve had that and I need it back. You know perfectly well it was only a loan. I’m not joking. I know you’re in there….. 

For the Chosen People, obviously  the Church of England (and if you disagree then I’m sorry, but we’ll have to invade your country, burn your huts, put whatever of yours we like in a museum in London and work as slaves those of you who don’t get smallpox from us, same as we always used to), the thing about our sacred faith is that apart from weddings and funerals and Midnight Mass at Christmas if you stay sober that late, you don’t really have to do much about it.

As our Prime Minister told us, you can tax the poor and cut services for the sick and God, apparently, is pretty much ok with that, even if vicars and bishops aren’t, in the same way you can decide you’re (well, ok, other people are) going to have a war and still pitch up at the Cenotaph doing your solemn Brave Soldier face using the same expression you wore when you first read about the Princess of Blandings getting swine vesicular disease.

An article of faith

As you may possibly have gathered by now, I’m not very religious. But even so, I think I’m more religious than the person who posted a thing about not denying Jesus on Facebook yesterday. It pretty much cemented my view about stupid and Facebook and how the symbiosis between the two isn’t just flourishing but essential.

The American (think Gahd, guns and too many grits) Facebook post ran like this:

A drunk man came home from a bar and shot his wife and the neighbours in front of his little girl until the police shot him. The girl was taken to a care centre where she pointed up at a picture of Jesus at Calvary and asked “how did that man get down from the Cross?’ The doctor told her, “He didn’t.” The little girl said yes he did, that was the man behind the sofa with me who told me everything would be ok. 66% of you won’t share this. So remember Jesus said if you deny me I will deny you to your father.

Awwww!

I don’t know which part of this I find the most loathsome, apart from all of it. The sanctimony, the made-up statistic used to assert the fact of it all, the blackmail, the threat, the nonsensicalself-contradictory plain stupid of the idea that if you don’t repost some trite bullshit on Facebook your God, the one you’ve just been pretending is a God of compassion not even fifteen seconds ago will consign you to eternal damnation, the total acceptance that hey, people do come home from bars and shoot up the neighbourhood, or the total lie that there was anyone behind the sofa with the equally non-existent girl.

But most of all, I despise the fake Christianity of the thing, fake in the most fundamental way, bullying masquerading as religion, the same way it always was in my family.

Church of England Archbishops don’t really have to be on much more than nodding terms with God when they believe in him at all, but even my dim recollection of Sunday school at St Thomas’s – and no, I didn’t make that up, that’s what my boyhood church actually was, Thomas the Doubter’s – told me one fundamental thing that seems to have escaped the gun-totin’ blackmailing bullying misogynists who go for that kind of post and that kind of religion: the whole point was that He actually WAS supposed to have got down from the Cross and risen again.

There isn’t anything more fundamental about the entire religion than that. That’s the central thing. Born in a stable. Ox and ass. Carpentry. Easter. Cross. Tomb. Walking. Ascension. Ever and ever. Amen.

And if you like as an optional extra where I’m from, his uncle Joseph of Arimethea took the Holy Grail to Glastonbury and planted a thorn tree that sprang out of his staff and almost certainly lent it to King Arthur. And yes he did exist because I’ve seen that tree with my own eyes, so ner!

We know that much. In the West Country, anyway. Which is more worth knowing than trying to blackmail people into doing what you want citing a religion you can’t even remember the basic details of.

 

 

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The French Lieutenant’s Christmas

Twenty years ago I went to Lyme Regis.

It’s one of the oddest, most wonderful English seaside towns I know. Ten days at Christmas there was magical. Even though I nearly, very nearly, got killed, along with the person I was with.

It was my fault.

We’d driven down some hundred miles or so, staying in a friend’s flat that was the top floor of a building about 250 years old where the sound of seagulls woke us every morning for an early walk down to The Cob to see if the huge ship moored and obviously dragging its anchor closer to the beach each day was going to be still there or wrecked, until one morning it was simply gone.

We’d witnessed a car crash outside the town on a snowy road caused because someone was changing their CD and had been driving like an accident looking for somewhere to happen. So we set off to the west of the town, where the cliffs crumble into the sea, more each time it rains, a place you can hear the landslips, hear the water oozing through the mud and rock, which isn’t reassuring. We walked along the beach, looking for fossils, because we knew we were safe from the tide coming in. I’d read the tide tables. Except I’d read them back to front, so when I thought it was low tide it was high tide and now we were trapped between a rising tide and shale cliffs that were marked “Impassable” on the map.

We proved that was wrong but it wasn’t funny. We couldn’t go back along the beach. And as we climbed we found ourselves on all fours a few times, then literally surfing back down the cliffs on lumps of rock that had come loose. We didn’t have a choice. Both of us thought at one point that we might not actually get out of this. We didn’t have phones with us. We got up onto some sort of plateau of wind-blasted trees at some point, about half-way up, where we knew for the first time that we wouldn’t fall back into the sea. But there was no road or path leading to this place. We still had to climb the rest of the cliffs or stay there forever, so we climbed. It took hours. It wasn’t as bad, but it wasn’t great. Nor, when we reached the top, was finding we were in the middle of a huge bramble patch and had to go through it to get to someone’s farmyard. It wasn’t a day of choices, after the first wrong one. But we lived.

We went to church at midnight after we saw practically the whole town go past the windows of the Naval Volunteer, the pub we were in. There’s another pub at the bottom of the hill but I’ve never felt at ease there. It used to be used as a mortuary after shipwrecks. There were old people going along to the church, middle class couples wrapped in big coats and odder, young people, girls in their teens straight out of the pub and into the church standing like the beacon it was, bright lit on the hill in the dark.

I was given a saxophone that Christmas. Before we’d got home the mouthpiece disappeared and although we looked everywhere we could think of in that old flat and searched the car and pockets and everywhere else, it was gone. We drove to Bridport thinking there might be a music shop there but no luck. Except when we got back to the flat the mouthpiece was sitting in the exact centre of the floor. There was no possible way we could not have seen it if it had been there. It just wasn’t.

Lyme, where one summer we saw a family and their adult friends, all of them tall and blond and fine-looking throwing something down the Undercliff rocks, one to the other, passing it like a rugby ball and as it was thrown past we both of us thought, separately, ‘that’s a baby.’ We talked about it later. Years later we still both think it was their baby, wrapped up and apparently used to this.

More things as odd have happened there. More things more magical. I love that place. But I won’t be there this Christmas. Another year.

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Solstice blues

The longest day is 21st June, but the day that feels longest is 21st December, the shortest.

Actually, that’s not true. Right now, every one of them seems like the longest, dreariest, dullest, dark by five o’clock but some days it seems like four day it’s possible to imagine. It’s ok. Even though it’s not. I just get like this every year.

Seasonal Affected Disorder or Seasonally Acquired Depression or whatever it’s properly called happens to lots of people. And as I type that I can hear my mother’s faux-joy denying there was anything wrong, denying utterly that there could possibly be anything wrong, and certainly nothing that needed any investigation by outsiders, oh dear me  no. But there was. And there is.

IMG_0476.jpg
In this light, with this mood, you look at this picture and think ‘I didn’t even see there was a    couple there when I took this. Smug gits. I hope the tide came in and caught them out.’ It’s not  right, is it?

 

The light messes me up a bit. The lack of it. It makes me spiral down and because it’s not like breaking your arm or even getting a cold, where one day you’re fine and the next day you’re very obviously not, it’s easy for me to forget it’s happening, as it always does, and do something about it.

Which is easy, just get out of the house and put the SAD lamp on when I’m in. Because otherwise I’ll just sit on the sofa or lie in bed, focussing on things that have gone wrong (the same kinds of things everyone has. I hope…) and how it will always be this way now. And forgetting that actually, that’s bollocks. It won’t be.

In a fortnight the shortest day comes and the days slowly, but then quite quickly get longer and the evenings lighter, until by the end of January, by any stretch of anyone’s reckoning still winter, it’s much lighter and brighter. Even if it’s usually colder than December, in my experience, anyway.

And I can deal with that. That’s what the scarf I bought at the Christmas market in Hungerford, 21 years ago this Christmas, or maybe it was only twenty, but it wasn’t any less, is for. It was as brilliant as Christmas markets always are, sparkling in the dark, little stalls where you could talk to the people who actually made the things they were selling, the woman who made my green scarf. It’s got some holes in it where the zip on my Barbour or a succession of them snagged it, as it will again this winter. As perhaps it should. That’s what too the big wool gloves lined with Thinsulate and the palms faced with leather are for, the ones I got in Copenhagen one freezing day in March, 2005,  few minutes I had between getting off the ferry and catching a train to Hamburg, the glove-shop more like a big wardrobe than any shop in England, but despite its size perfect, with exactly and precisely what I wanted, real gloves that would last a substantial chunk of a lifetime.

The hat – well, the wool hat lined with Thinsulate went the way of all the best hats, on someone else’s head and I don’t know where. Or when. I haven’t got it now. Nor the Mercedes I had when I drove down to Lyme Regis for Christmas and New Year twenty years back, one of the best Christmasses ever, nor the stone barn I had in Stow-on-the-Wold nineteen years ago this Christmas, rather blighted by the bank deciding to pull a third of the business overdraft. At least I had the satisfaction that the bank manager was sacked shortly afterwards. I haven’t got something I thought I might have from last Christmas either, but I never really did anyway. What I need to not have is a downward mood because it gets dark early.

It’ll be ok. Really. Everything. It will. It does every year. It’s just the light.

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Risking it

I used to research things. That was my job. I stopped doing it when the internet told everyone they knew everything anyway, because we live in an entitled world of stupid. And I couldn’t be bothered with telling people what they were already paid to know. I didn’t have the patience any more to sit there while people just wanted their prejudices confirmed and blamed the research and therefore me if their prejudices were shown to be just that and nothing more. Especially then.

Stupid people wear me out. Especially when they pay people not to call them stupid.

The decision to bomb Syria must count as one of the most stupid things I’ve seen in a long time, just on statistics alone.

The ISIS attack on the cafe in France killed over 150 people. It was utterly horrible. Nobody there deserved to die. So how much more horrible must it be when over ten times that many people are killed?

 

Imagine 1,700 people killed and 180,000 injured, not just once, but over and over again? Every year. In the UK.

Please don’t say that’s really horrible, because you don’t think it is. In fact, you think that’s an acceptable fact of life in exchange for the convenience of driving to the supermarket.

Meanwhile, the average number of people killed in the UK per year is……5. That’s the average from 2001 to 2011, including 7/7, which bumped up the average massively.

Five people dead is too many. Nobody could argue with that.

And at the same time 1,700 is just one of those things.

I don’t understand how that works.

 

 

 

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