Carl Bennett – Page 23 – Writer-insighter

Another place, another time

The joke went that a receptionist got this brilliant job for Wang, the computer company, back when nobody really knew what computers did apart from the Accounts department and typists. She’d done some German at school so when she got the chance to apply for the Koln office she thought that might a good idea for the CV, see a foreign country, all kinds of reasons. But it didn’t work out. She kept answering the phone by giving the name of the company and the location of the office and people thought she was saying something else. If you use the English pronunciation of Cologne, which she wouldn’t as the office was in Germany.

Like any joke, like any reference, you have to have a shared set of assumptions for it to work, a supporting world where everyone in on it knows much the same sorts of things. So obviously you have to know what an Accounts department is and roughly what they do, and accounts and therefore sums is pretty much enough knowledge to understand how a computer might help out there. Except of course computers did much more than help out there when before that there were only manual adding machines you typed a number into and pulled a chrome lever like a pinball machine which printed the number you’d typed on paper that came off a rotating drum, ratcheted forward by the cogs and teeth pulled around by the lever, pulled around mechanically by you.

If you were there. But you can imagine it anyway, whether or not you were. We make a picture of her in our heads, this girl, just from the words we use. Because it’s Wang it’s the 1970s or maybe 1980s, whether or not you were even born then, so we know what she’s wearing. We’ve seen pictures, at least, films, or old photos with the colour just that bit wrong enough to tell us whatever was happening wasn’t now but then. We know she’s probably blond, probably dyed and she wears coloured nail varnish. Her skirt’s a bit tight, even if it is respectably knee-length. She probably smokes too. JPS, or More, those long, thin, menthol cigarettes that reeked also of sophistication if you lived in a country town.

She might have her own car, this girl, a Mini or maybe on the furthest shores of reality, a Renault 5, but not a new one. No way a new one. In the winter she has problems starting it and the windows fug up with condensation sometimes, just from breathing and the heater, not smoke. But she definitely smokes. As for what else she definitely does, apart from worries about her weight but not so much that she goes to a gym, because people don’t back then, certainly not girls like her and there weren’t any anyway, we don’t know. She probably does. I mean, look at her. That’s the look you want on Reception, pretty much wherever you go, back then. In our heads.

And we know exactly what her voice sounds like as she says the two words, the two words, the three syllables that she pronounces with a tonal shift to make it sound like four, the flat tone of Wang then the same tone again for the first syllable, the /co/, the raised tone of /low/ and the split drop down of /own/, the single syllable split into two tones so the word rises in the middle but not so much of a drop that it starts back at the same tone. It doesn’t. It’s a little higher. You can see her saying this on the phone, in this cheaply furnished Reception with the wood painted black, on her red phone with her red nails and the grey and beige switchboard, her eyes on yours although she’s on the phone, a cheap pen in the other hand held aloft. If you move a bit you can probably look down her shirt; she knows you’re trying to do that anyway. Depends whether she’ll let you or not. But she does know. Definitely. The same way she doesn’t know that when she says the company name and the town like that, it sounds like she’s recommending solitary onanism. But of course she isn’t. Because she wouldn’t be calling it Cologne if she answered the phone in Germany. And Wang probably never had an office there anyway.

We don’t need her. She never existed. She’s gone. She never was. Except you can see her in your mind, picture her sitting on a wall in the park one sunny summer lunchtime. With all our shared assumptions. All our histories.

Learning to care

I totalled a car once. I was younger and I liked and at the time needed to go fast for reasons which aren’t clear to me now, at all. I had some bumps but because of the country roads that I drove on I didn’t hit any other cars. The only time I did wasn’t my fault. It happened when someone with his whole small family in the car decided to turn into a side road, across my lane. I braked and turned as well but it was just physics – I couldn’t stop fast enough to avoid hitting him. Nobody was hurt.

I nearly killed my best friend. She would have been dead if she hadn’t put on the seat belt she ought to have been wearing anyway, just a few minutes before I ran out of road one icy night on a reverse camber corner in the middle of nowhere, but sadly somewhere not quite remote enough not to have a telegraph pole that I put smack in the middle of the front of the car. She still talks to me.

If you pick up any newspaper you’ll see what you’re supposed to be afraid of this week. It could be immigrants, ISIS, D’aesh, Al-Quaeda or Cilla Black’s ghost maid, which according to the Daily Express is a real thing. Between them all, these sources of supreme evil managed to kill less than 10 UK citizens in 2013. You killed over 1,700. That’s probably why it’s not in the news.

According to the Government – and you can see the exact figures if you click on the link about how many people you killed – in 2013 1,713 people were killed in road accidents in the UK. More than rail crashes, airplane crashes, shipwrecks or acts of any war we’ve had for decades. And we don’t care. If we did we’d put it on the news.

Why don’t we care? Maybe we do, but we can’t face it. The same way that hardly anybody ever gets prosecuted for manslaughter when they kill someone with their car or truck. The same way you can drive a car up onto the pavement in Southwold, kill someone and not even get a arrested. That happened a few summers ago. I don’t know any other crime where the defence “I didn’t do it on purpose” works so well.

Next time you see the news and marvel at the latest ‘terror threat’ or swarm of people who only have hope left, and hear how all of this is this week’s existential threat to our way of life, think about our existential way of death, and how you know the acceptable casualty rate after which something must be done. In 2013 it was 1,713. Nothing else came even vaguely close.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/annual-road-fatalities

Once bitten

We had dogs when I was a boy. The first one was a Collie I went stealing with. We used to go to the village shop in Snitterfield before I was even two and help ourselves to the things laid out on the lower shelves. We were firm but fair – if we had to reach for things we didn’t eat them. If we didn’t then we did, on the spot. It was a simple strategy and effective as only simple strategies with limited objectives tend to be.

Later in Gillingham (the Dorset one, thankfully) there was a labrador I have no memory of whatsoever. Where there should be a dog there isn’t even a dog-shaped hole through my memory, like the ones on the Tom and Jerry cartoons. There isn’t. It’s just blank. Lots of that time is. I don’t know if there was a dog when we moved to Southwick. There was a cat, but it ran off, we were told. I don’t think it did. The main road at the end of our road killed all kinds of things, dogs, cats, chickens and people, at least twice in the time I lived there, the road carpeted with Maltesers one morning after a lorry crashed.

This isn't me, you understand.... — This isn’t me, you understand….

Then there was a dog. It was the time of the Dulux dog. Because my father was a lying fantasist we got a Pyrenean Mountain dog, the same as the one on Belle and Sebastian, before the name was synonymous with Millenial yawn-pop. And that was a weird TV show if anything was. An orphan in a tiny snowy village who distincly looked a few steps along the autistic spectrum with a penchant for polo-neck sweaters had a huge dog as a friend. He lived in a stone house in the mountains and nobody seemed to do anything much that anyone would pay them for: a guy who looked like a former Maquisard with PTSD, an old man who had trouble shaving and an elegant, sultry, chic woman who had obviously taken a wrong turning and who seemed to be Sebastian’s reluctant foster mother. When she wasn’t making me feel funnily.

So far so silly. But not as silly as getting a Pyrenean Mountain dog that you think an advertising agency is going to hire and make your fortune. This was the total BS we were told as children. And you wonder why. Anyway. The advertising agency who my father didn’t know never called and he was never there, so I had to take this sodding dog for a walk, aged eight. It was nothing like Belle and Sebastian. At all. There were no mountains in Wiltshire, for a start. And very little snow. Nor smugglers, avalanches nor leftover stuff from The War, which used to take up quite a bit of time on TV shows for kids in those days, not just on Belle & Sebastian but on The White Horses too, where some blond girl and her mysterious protector who was nothing whatsoever to do with the Lippizaner Stud, nor the SS troops who ran it and weren’t just dab hands with a lunging rein but who also stopped the American advance on Vienna, oh dear me no, nothing whatsoever to do with all that at all, just an honest businessman who happens to be fond of long black boots, that’s all. They were strange times.

The dog was a pain. I had no idea how to control it and it was physically bigger than me anyway. It used to run away quite often and given the choice I would have done too. My father did what he always did: left problems like walking the thing twice a day for everyone else to sort out and came back to pose about playing the big man with his fancy dog.

Eventually it went to live with a friend of my mother in Ealing, which seemed fair. Then there were no more dogs for about eight years, until my step-father got an Irish terrier. He thought it was going to be about Jack Russel size, remembering how he thought they were. I think he was thinking of a different breed altogether. This thing was more like the ones you used to see on trolleys, with a handle for small children to push, pretending they had their own dog. Maybe my father should have got one of those instead. It would have been easier all round.

Nobody trained the thing. It wasn’t the dog’s fault. It used to run off too, but somehow by that time I could run faster than the dog, which came as a surprise to both of us. It wasn’t my dog anyway. Then there was the Great Dog Disaster when I was supposed to be helping a girlfriend look after her Afghan hound while her parents were away for a week.

I say helping, but that just meant taking it for a walk. I wasn’t actually supposed to be there, but obviously, her parents were away for the week. It was a big dog but a quiet one. They got burgled once and everyone thought the dog was the target because the house was empty when everyone got home. Until the dog came out from behind the sofa where it had been hiding from the burglars. The only time it ever bit anyone, which it did several times in those less litigious days, was when it was tied to a postbox while whoever was walking it went into a shop. The dog had the idea it had to guard whatever it was tied to, so posting letters became more complicated than it needed to be. The week too, as the dog managed to become not just one of the first black Afghans in the UK, which it was, but also one of the first to die of parvo virus. It took just a few days. It was all pretty horrible.

Then no dogs for years. I went to look at a house to buy in Burnham on Crouch. I stood talking to the owner while her terrier ran in to the room, jumped up on the sofa behind me and bit my hand. The woman totally denied anything had happened, which was at odds with the blood coming out of my hand. Oddly, I didn’t buy her house. I should have had her dog destroyed.

Then I met someone with huge, muscley dogs. She brought them round occasionally. I woke up one morning and reached for flesh, as you do, to find something bristly and warm that seemed to have steel underneath it. I didn’t remember her being quite like that the night before; her dog had crept into the bed between us while we slept. She told me that I’d get bitten if I behaved the way I did around her dogs. Then her dogs would be taken away and put to sleep, which she didn’t want, so she taught me how to behave so dogs wouldn’t detest me on sight.

It worked with someone else’s dogs after that, too. She had two rescue dogs. One was boisterous and disturbed while the other one was traumatised by having been nearly killed by a bigger dog. Maybe it was to protect the little dog that the bigger one almost invariably attacked other dogs without any warning at all if they so much as looked at him. Or even if they didn’t. We walked a lot last winter, into the spring, as the weather stopped being so cold and the evenings started to get longer. It was a quiet time, walking the river path with those dogs. The little one learned to play with a ball, something she’d never done before. And to bark when I arrived to take her out. Often her owner was asleep until the little dog barked, then she woke and handed me the leads. The door was usually left open, on the latch. I asked if she thought it was safe leaving the door unlocked like that. She said there wasn’t any danger at all.

“I knew it was you. She only barks for you.

Somewhere on the Eastern front

The postman told me what happened. Why he’d been summoned to the manager’s office when everyone, even the manager, said he hadn’t done anything wrong.

He’d come in to work as usual but today someone else had gone sick. Could he do that round instead of his normal one? Just for today? Or until the other postman was well enough to come in?

Of course. It wasn’t any kind of problem. It was just that he lived in a different place to the postie who normally did the round so he slightly, very slightly, re-arranged it so that when he delivered the last letter of the day he’d be nearest his home, after making sure that all the Special Delivery letters were delivered on time, the really expensive ones before 09:00 and the normal Specials before 13:00, just the way people expected when they bought the special delivery service.

Everything got delivered. Everything got signed for. Everything that was supposed to be delivered by nine in the morning had been and everything that had to be delivered by one in the afternoon had been as well. Which didn’t explain the furious phone call to his manager.

Because it’s Aldeburgh

Perhaps, calmly, he could just go over when he delivered all the Specials?

Quite obviously, Aldeburgh Golf Club's flag in the 100% safe Tory seat of Suffolk Coastal couldn't possibly be confused with any other flag in the world, ever. Except perhaps one. — Quite obviously, Aldeburgh Golf Club’s flag in the 100% safe Tory seat of Suffolk Coastal couldn’t possibly be confused with any other flag in the world, ever. Except perhaps one.

Because there’s been this phone call. From some woman with a weekend house and two lazy arses of sons who couldn’t be bothered to get up when they were supposed to. Who ignored alarm clocks. Who couldn’t be asked to set the alarm on their mobiles in case it infringed their human rights. And lurk, rarely, the only way they could be made to get up is if they had to open the front door because they always got out of bed to do that in case it was a friend of theirs, yah? Say when Mummy had had to go back to London leaving Tarquin and Ollie under their fetid high thread-count duvet covers the only way they could be got onto the train was to send them a Special Delivery letter.

Except the postman couldn’t be trusted, could he? He couldn’t do this one simple thing, to deliver Special Delivery letters that normally came at about eight in the morning if you got the before nine option. Oh no. Not him. Not Mr Work To Rule. And I’m glad they’re privatised, I rarely am, frankly. Because one paid for the before nine service and do you know when it arrived? Hmmm? Do you? I said do you? 08:55, that’s when. So they missed their train. And what exactly is the Post Office gaying to do about it? Well?

And depressingly, that’s a true story, told to me by the postman.

A fine dust

Longer ago than I want to think about I looked forward to everything Ian McEwan got published. I used my student grant to buy his books as soon as they went into paperback. The Cement Garden uncomfortably echoed living in a flat in Southampton while I was at university there, the hot empty cull-de-sac street and the smell of something that wouldn’t go away layered over the smell of life driving past on the dual-carriageway at the end of the road and the unhealthy relationship I was in at the time.

One of my favourite things he wrote I don’t think anyone has heard of now. Solid Geometry. It was about a man who inherits a notebook written by his great-great grandfather, who had disappeared; the reader learns how to do it. The one in the story you understand, not, oh, you know. Not, ok?

Reading it, there was a phrase which stuck in my head, about how energy can’t just disappear, as we know from Year Three Physics. It becomes something else, movement becomes heat in friction or kinetic energy from something small is absorbed by something bigger, but it’s still there. It doesn’t just go away. Except, we believe, when something dies. In the same way McEwan was speculating about the ‘fine dust blowing all over Cheapside’, the way we breath the atoms of everyone who ever lived, good, bad, or ugly, Saxon carters, Cumbrian tranters, Prince Rupert’s cavaliers and the sourest Puritans, all alike, around us all forever. This fine dust.

I absorbed quite a lot of it at the Sir John Soane museum last week in a visit I’d moronically put off for 20-odd years. And when I walked past the pop-up cafe nearby in Lincolns Inn Fields, at last free of the fear of spontaneous combustion that haunted me for years after having to read Bleak House at school, there they were, characters from a Lautrec painting, kitchen staff on their break, lounging in the shade of the trees in poses and light straight from the post-Impressionist handbook, or at least the one used by Pissarro or Bonnard. Here they are. I think they’re probably the best phone photo I’ve ever taken.

Reading with the enemy

Longer ago than I want to admit knowing about Magazine had a song called Feed The Enemy.

Yes you do know. Almost certainly, if you’re in any way seriously into music, otherwise you’re in the same camp as someone saying they don’t know anything about Mozart because he did his stuff before they were born. And this on a rainy summer day when it’s far too wet to go for a walk and it’s Sunday too and even though there’s no school tomorrow and hasn’t been for several decades, only Kate Bush’s early songs can do justice to the mood of just-deferred despair that’s always been England, in my experience. I don’t mean the manic roaring in the ears of the Hounds of Love, but more the determined languid resignation of The Kick Inside. Anywaaaaaay, as girls called Emma used to say, curled up half-kneeling on the carpet in front of the fire in their Dad’s living room in the half dark of just the same kind of Sunday afternoons.

Anyway. Feed the Enemy was written when just for a change the official story of Stuff That Just Is was just as split-personality as it is now. The Soviets are a threat. All the time. They want to destroy our way of life. So we’d better sell them cheap butter and wine that’s cheap because we make too much of it so the EC buys it and flogs it off to the USSR and complains about them invading Afghanistan at the same time. When university politics lecturers said things like ‘the USSR has to expand somewhere…’ (yes I’m looking at you, Southampton University Class of Oh Is That The Time Already?) It doesn’t really matter when it was. The names change but it’s always the same story. We give people guns or look the other way when our friends do then run about screaming that they’re trying to destroy our way of life.

Anywaaaaaaay, all of which, imaginary Emma from long ago, is a way of saying I had a bit of a First World Problem this week. Do you feed the enemy or not? I wanted a book. It was a biography of Rommel and the first page grabbed me because of the way it was written. It wasn’t the usual MilHist: “at 18:24 the XIVDivision advanced towards Mersa Matruh unchecked with only light casualties” describing families’s hopes and dreams like their menfolk rent limb from limb and burned alive. It was actually readable, about the man behind the legend.

So far so what?

Rude, but a fair point. I didn’t always read this stuff. I feel I need to now, possibly because I didn’t, possibly because for my generation the War as The Big Secret that adults didn’t talk about in any detail, it being distinctly bad form if they did and also as I know now, because it was much, much too soon away to start talking about it. And for other reasons involving people I know and people I’ve met and talked to.

The big FWP was simple. I wanted to buy the book. But it was written by David Irving. Mr Holocaust Denier. I wasn’t there. I’ve seen the photos and everyone else has as well, the same as I’ve seen photos of unicorns. In Photoshop world a photo on your laptop screen doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. I read about the American massacre of guards at Auschwitz who got themselves machine-gunned after they surrendered because the liberating Americans found a train full of machine-gunned Jews there. The fact that American aircraft had shot it up not knowing and not able to know what or who was inside wasn’t known and was surprisingly not well-advertised until much later. I don’t know if, as Irving maintained, there was or wasn’t arsenic in the plaster of the walls at the camp. But I’ve met people who saw piles of bodies at the camps with their own eyes.

I don’t understand why if there were extermination camps rather than say, camps where no-one particularly cared if the inmates died or not, why anyone at all survived there. But whether those people died of gas or bullets or typhoid doesn’t really matter, it seems to me. It also seems insane to say that what thousands of people saw for themselves just didn’t happen.

Hence the dillemma. The book was second-hand, after all, so it’s not as if Mr Irving was going to get my money for his stuff, and it was written a decade before he seems to have finally gone nuts and started saying things people I’ve spoken to saw for themselves just didn’t happen. But still. Do you buy the book? Do you have anything to do with people whose ideas are mind-numbingly offensive, however remote? Do you feed the enemy or not?

It’s always raining over the border
There’s been a plane crash out there
In the wheat fields
They’re picking up the pieces
We could go and look and stare

How many friends have we over there?
The border guards fight unconvincingly
Whatever we do it seems things are arranged
We always have to feed the enemy.

Magazine (Tomlinson/Devoto/Sony – Feed The Enemy).

The old man who told me about the time he saw the piles of bodies for himself, along with the rest of his squadron when they occupied a German airfield also told me how his unit marched the inhabitants of the nearest German town through the camp so nobody could say “I didn’t know.” He also told me how that evening there was a serious discussion about how maybe it would be a good idea to just break open the armoury and go back into town and shoot everyone they saw.

It could be me, obviously

Oliver Sachs.

Yes I know. He’s brilliant, isn’t he. Superb. So, so I don’t know, perceptive. I bet he’s got a voice like that on the radio too. And those books that everyone’s read, like the Man Who Did Something With A Hat or something. You’ve read it. You say you have, anyway. And the way he states the entirely obvious all the time and gives the impression this is supremely remarkable. Brilliant. Isn’t it?

The Man Who Ought To Have Stroked A Cat

He goes for a walk in Norway and there’s a bull in a field. There’d been a sign saying watch out, there’s a bull in the field but he’d ignored it. Was it in Norwegian? Why did he think it was, as he said, just a Norwegian farmer’s sense of humour? Really because the field was up a hill? Sorry, this guy’s supposed to be really intelligent, isn’t he? The same way he was when he strapped 18 months of research notes to his motorcycle seat with a bungee, rather than say, putting them in a bag so they wouldn’t fall off and blow all over the road and get lost forever.

He looks at the bull and because it’s huge and probably going to kill him he focusses on its nose. He falls down the hill and breaks his leg and thinks he’s going to freeze to death and it’s the most amazing sensation when he’s rescued and doesn’t die after all. Stunning. He has his leg in plaster for months and then has problems walking. Wow. Such insight. He loses vision in his eye and guess what? He can’t see out of it and bumps into things. And he can’t imagine what’s in the field of vision he hasn’t got, because he can’t see it.

“I documented all this in minute detail.”

Oliver, I know. So far so blah. Those pages aren’t going to fill themselves, after all.

Oh and he gets his entire existence vilified by his mother but hey, it’s just her upbringing, no biggie.

Hold on. Just back up a moment there. He says he thinks girls are alright, has a chat with his dad and says he thinks boys are a bit more so but he’s never done anything about it and best not tell mum and next morning his mother calls him an abomination and somehow none of this needs looking at in any detail whatsoever. Not the total betrayal of trust, the name-calling, the auto-hatred she’s able to switch on. Nope. That’s how she was brought up. Really. Janet And John must have had a special chapter that covered telling your doll that you wish she’d never been born if she says she likes people and haven’t done anything about it. Naturally.

I’ve never liked his writing. It isn’t fresh or as much fun for me as it is for him. I don’t get it, at all. But most of all I don’t understand why stating the obvious in a comprehensive study of self-absorption is supposed to be so enthralling.

The power of drivel

I was reading something on a Linkedin forum. I know, ok? I’ve never really seen the point of it. You can ‘connect’ with people, but you can on Facebook and see what they had for dinner and what their cat looks like too. I think Linkedin would say it’s ‘more professional,’ because you can post your CV up and well, join in discussions. Maybe without getting in fights with total strangers the Facebook way. Although reading this morning, my first reaction was to start TYPING IN CAPITALS to show how annoyed I was. And that was when I was agreeing with someone.

It was only a thing about avoiding jargon. Harmless enough, yes? Well no, actually. Not harmless at all.

Very often, the evaluator is a young, relatively inexperienced person who has come of age in a fast -paced, digital world highly dependent upon graphics, very light on lengthy paragraphs, living in the present, unversed in the subtle distinctions of grammar.

By deduction then, we should perhaps become less inclined to favor a narrative approach to our proposals, in favor of a graphical one.

Ignore the thing about living in the present, because only a few remaining people who remember Jethro Tull are actually living in the past. Just ignore it. What we’re saying here is that somebody who needs cartoons to understand something has been given the job of evaluating million-pound proposals. Say, to build a motorway, or get the bins emptied outside every house in a city every Tuesday morning (tender must include option dates for Christmas collections). How do we deal with that?

Cut and paste little bags of money in the costs section? Maybe it’s the way forward. I’m assuming we’re not going to look at the option of actually hiring anyone who can read and write properly, because that might be a bit threatening and disrupt the office dynamic. I think I’ve got that right.

The blood pressure really became an issue when I clicked on the next article. It was about integrating marketing information with business strategy and whether it was a good idea. You do know. Whether what the business should do next should be based on facts or what the chairman’s wife thought she heard at the hairdresser’s. The use of the words business and strategy in that order alone should have told me not to read it. This definitely did:

“A nice process description. I would add the need for the strategist to interwork with people in the internal team as well as the customers. By communicating the strategy internally you gain buy-in, acceptance and alignment of the organisation with the strategic goals so that all employees that contact the customer are on the same message.”

I’m quite good at work but I don’t know what interwork is. Apart from pompous, redundant drivel.

And no, I can’t think of a cartoon graphic that would illustrate the concept, apart from an enormous ass. As for gaining acceptance and alignment – let me see. Does that mean you tell people what the company’s going to do in an attempt to get them to accept it and so that staff don’t totally piss-off the customers by telling them rubbish? It’s an idea, certainly.

So why not say so?

The waiting

It’s the longest day today and up here in Scotland where I am right now, holed-up on the run in a small hotel in Tomintoul, that means the days are very, very long.

Because it’s Scotland it’s raining and it’s cold. I had to buy a sweater yesterday. I’d packed a spare but when I put it on it looked as if dogs had slept on it. Then I remembered that’s exactly what had happened back in January. That was a nice time. A hopeful time, cold but the days getting longer, one by one till now.

Near Christmas you hear Peter Gabriel’s song about ring out Solstice bells. Nobody knows what it means. It’s just another word, the way words are supposed to mean anything anyone wants them to mean now. It’s another solstice today. I don’t hear any bells ringing at all.

The place I was passing had a sale on, so I got a really nice jumper for £20. But it’s not the same as the old one. That was Italian, from Peek & Klopenburg in Dam Square, and even though it was in a sale it was a bit more than £20. It paid for itself though; I bought it back in 2002. Or 2003. I can’t really remember. I was in Amsterdam quite a bit for a while, for reasons which need not be examined too closely but were legal if not perhaps entirely moral. It depends, I think. Possibly.

Anyway.

Anyway, after today we’ll all be able to say it once again, showing our true British pessimism. Altogether now at 7pm tomorrow night please, roll your eyes skyward and say ruefully:

“Aye, the nights are fair drawing in noo.”

How the West was won.

1024px-Jesse-james-farm — The little homestead Jesse James came from. It wasn’t enough for his father.

A long time ago I had a friend from Kentucky. His great grandpa had seen Jesse James ride past. It was a family ritual he was lucky enough to be just born long enough ago for this very old man to do his party piece, the same way he’d told the story to his own son, and to his grandchildren and probably anybody else who would listen, the way men do.

The little boy was lead into the old man’s presence the same way other little boys had been for the past fifty years.

“Listen, great gran’pa’s gonna tell you ’bout the time he saw Jesse James…”

Like a lot of American heroes or maybe heroes anywhere, Jesse James had what might be called interpersonal relationship issues.

A man with surprising relationship issues. — A man with a limited anger management skillset.

He was born in 1847 in Missouri and got pulled into the Civil War as a teenager. It wasn’t like the song. It wasn’t big battles and flags and sad bugles, but a gang of people who went after another gang of people, preferably on their own, or at least hopefully vastly outnumbered and taken by surprise. James was fifteen when that started. After the war he took the skills he had, which were mostly killing people, and used them to rob banks and trains. Eventually one of his gang members called Robert Ford did the sensible thing and blew a hole the size of a tea-cup through him while he was hanging a picture in a house he’d rented.

There were popular stories which had the James gang as latter-day Robin Hoods, but the people they robbed didn’t think so. The ones who survived, anyway. It was a time when there weren’t police, interstates, paved roads in Missouri, cars, indoor lavatories or pretty much anything else we have now.

So the little boy, like generations of little boys before him stood in awe at the old man’s knee while older men, his brothers and uncles who’d all heard the story at the same knee stood there and smirked, waiting to hear it again.

“Did I ever tell you ’bout the time I saw Jesse James? I was about as big as you are now when he rode past me on his horse, about as close as you’re standing. I could’ve reached out and touched him.”

And the little boy’s eyes went wide and the older boys and men nudged each other and winked and waited as the little boy said, the same way they’d said for half a century and more, “So what did you do, g’paw?”

And the old man paused and maybe looked around the rest of his audience, judging the pause even though it was a true story, before he thought the time was right to tell the little boy about outlaws and the people who weren’t before he said quietly:

“I hid in the ditch.”