Carl Bennett – Page 39 – Writer-insighter

Resolutions: 2014

There’s an old Wicca tradition about bad stuff. I know, I’m doing a lot about traditions at this time of year, but it’s a good time of year for it. Christmas is over and whatever you think about that, the days are going to get longer and longer until they’re magically, sleep-stealingly long, the way they were when I swapped stories and dreams with someone with a bottle of wine under a eucalyptus tree last summer.

After this year I have a lot less bad stuff to get rid of. But I’m going to write down some things I’m going to do this year and being a hip and happening kind of guy I thought I might as well put these things here, where everyone can see them and challenge me on them. So here they are. My resolutions for 2014. Or goals. My resolutions are for me and those they affect. My goals, well, this will kick me on along towards them. As we say down the stables.

1) I will direct and broadcast No Batteries Required on radio.

2) I will re-draft No Batteries Required as a screenplay and pitch it to Cascade, same as Not Your Heart Away.

3) I will find an independent publisher for Not Your Heart Away.

4) I will learn to play the ukelele. Actually, on advice from a friend who thinks my saxophone playing is pretty good, I’m sending the ukelele back and making a promise to myself to play the saxophone every single day. A quick blast through Kirsty McColl’s A New England was today’s effort, copied from the radio. The radio in my head, anyway.

5) I will perform 3 poems at the Open-Mic night at The Old Mariner, Woodbridge, 29th January.

6) I will write The Cloud Factory.

7) I will finish writing Janni Schenck, which started life as School Lane.

8) First I will decide the format for Janni Schenck, film, book or play.

9) While I’m there I might as well re-draft No Batteries Required as a stage play and get it performed, probably using the same actors and actresses who are doing it for radio.

10) I can’t actually think of a tenth thing. I mean, I can, but I can’t really put that on here publically so not that, not here. Instead, I will get better at playing my old low tone saxophone. I might even team up with someone who can do the music while I do a 1940s crooner set. This is a thing in my head. In a progress update I’ ve found someone, but she’s a bit committed. Life stuff. You know. Stuff.

I don’t know why when I was 14 the first album I ever bought was original 1944 RCA Victor Glenn Miller recordings. But it was and they were and they’ve stuck in my head forever. And I thought the other day that a Christmas present to myself might usefully be a mic-ed-up concert uke to accompany the songs I’ve always known. The Nearness of You. Fools Rush In. The Glenn Miller version obviously, not the pathetic Bow Wow Wow lift musak one. And probably Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens, the song my disappeared friend Simon Talbot used to introduce his radio show in Florida, about a thousand years ago. Or maybe How Long Will I Love You? If you want to do something useful in 2014, find Simon and tell me where he is. A lot of people who love him would like to know. And we don’t. It’s been years now. We miss him. A lot.

When the animals talk

I took a trip back through time this Christmas. In those strange days between Christmas itself and the New Year, when nothing is as it should be, when it’s too late to do much about this year and too early to do much about the next I drove to Poole to see an old friend, then up to Warminster to see an even older friend, one whose voice I used as Liz in Not Your Heart Away. I took two of her children to Bath. They wanted to do some shopping and I wanted to see yet another friend in the city. They were about the age Ben and Claire and Liz were in the book.

Along the way I turned off the A36 in Rode and took the old route I’d driven a hundred times and more, the same way Claire and Ben drove in the book to find The Red Lion. It’s fiction. I should have known. And I should have known better. It’s not just that the past is another country and they do things differently there. Whoever wrote that didn’t say ‘and they build executive homes in the car park of the Red Lion and ponce-up what was a brilliant pub into someone’s Disney fantasy of a baronial hall to live in.’

But things are never exactly as they seem. It all reminded me of a Christmas tradition we have or had in my family. I don’t know if anyone else still keeps it. I couldn’t, this year. Our tradition goes that at midnight on Christmas Eve, the animals talk. The year before I was born my mother and father stayed on my aunt’s farm and nearing midnight went into their stable to see if it was true, that the animals really did speak.

Last Christmas I went to church close to midnight but this is a dying village. The church was closed. As I got near the dark and silent building I remembered that Midnight Mass had been brought forward to six pm, a more convenient time for the old people who make up most of the village and all of the congregation. As I walked home along the empty road I remembered my family’s story. I got a torch and went to the tree where my chickens roosted then and shone it on the big young cockerel. I heard the church clock strike and as the light caught him the cockerel stirred and put his head back.

And is it true? Do the animals speak, remembering a stable in a story?

What sort of question is that? Of course it’s true. Nobody ever said they have to speak with a human voice.

Year End

A bit like the end of term round-up, this post. If I was marking up 2013 though, I’d have to have a word with its parents and note ‘must try harder’ on its report.

What did I do this year? Some of the things I set out to do. Got rid of my house. Re-homed most of the chickens. Won the BBC Writers Room competition. Did I mention that? Oh. Ok. Well, actually, I won the BBC Writers Room competition.

With a screenplay based on my book, Not Your Heart Away, which I also finished and published this past year.

Wrote some poems. Got a radio show. Wrote No Batteries Required, about a bankrupt chicken farmer who decides to kidnap a celebrity chef the same day the Prime Minister he was at school with goes to offer him a job as Minister of Food.

Anything else? Quite a lot. Tried to help. Lost my heart. Found it again. Put it in trust for someone who might appreciate it. Tried to stop acting like an arse quite as much as I managed to do for several months this year. Vowed to listen more and decide less. Walked a lot. I liked that. Took some decent photos. Got a new house to live in, that I think is nicer than the one I moved out of. Saw some old friends, made some old friends (no, not like that), caught up with some old friends and realised how fantastically valuable they are when you need them.

Tried to write School Lane, a story that started in Not Your Heart Away, a story about an old man who had been a young boy when he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, like almost every other small boy in Germany. And I couldn’t do it. Maybe I can next year. It became too complex, too involved, too much about Janni Schenck, the boy whose teacher beat him and his classmates up to stop them being killed by the American patrol coming to their village. Janni’s story expanded to include the Edelweiss Pirates, which meant I had to get him from Hamburg where they hung out to a small village in the mountains, where the real story, the one I heard from an old man in a pub long ago now was set, which was a story in itself.

And alarmingly, bought an electro-acoustic ukelele to do an open-mic 1940s crooner set comprising Fools Rush In, The Nearness of You and either Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens or How Much Do I Love You. Maybe. Or April Played The Fiddle. That bit might need some work. Like learning the ukelele for a start. And it’s sung impossibly high for me. I could do it fine when I was fourteen. Can’t do it now.

So this year coming, 2014 is a new start. New house. A new heart and some new friends. See you there.

Back to Ourselves

It’s been a hectic time, this Christmas, with a house move, a move into a hotel, a trip to Wiltshire and back, some 600 miles, then another house move and just time to meet some incredible new people and glimpse a life I know. So sorry, I haven’t posted anything recently. But as I was going through my stuff I found time to post up this poem what I wrote recently. It’s a bit Hugo Williams derivative, but I like Hugo Williams. It’s not about anybody specifically, just the end of summer, the end of holidays and the way people change, too.

Back to Ourselves

When one of us or both decide

That the songs don’t matter,

That it’s done, that we do have

A choice and somehow we don’t

Have to do the things that last week

Or last month or even yesterday we had

To do instead of everything else;

On the last day we start packing for

The trek back to ourselves after

Our little holiday, sand between

Our toes, another little white line,

And something sticking at the corner

Of our eyes; I expect it’s just a speck,

Probably. But you know, glad we went.

But we’re tired now and grateful to

Be home again, bags unpacked now

That we’ve shut the door;

Time to turn the lights on soon.

It gets so dark so early now.

I can’t quite see where I am at all.

Carl Bennett 2013

The enemy within

There was a miners’ strike 30 years ago. Now you have to explain to people what miners actually were. They were the British men who dug the coal we were told we didn’t have that is imported now instead of digging out the 200 years of the stuff sitting underground. Ten years back before that the government switched the electricity off to make people believe the miners were ‘holding the country to ransom’ in a way that banks and financial fraud never does. Chiefly because the banks had lawyers who would shut your mouth for you if you mentioned it and the NUM didn’t.

When you watch this video you will see a Britain that a lot of people who lived here then can recognise while few foreigner can. I still hate Thatcher’s voice, along with every single one of her policies. That whining, artificial, hypocritical drone filled the airwaves with lies.

“We don’t talk to terrorists. The IRA must be denied the oxygen of publicity” while the government was talking to them all of the time for just one single example. Oh actually, ‘violence doesn’t pay’ for another. It was supposed to pay for Our Brave Boys who were sent to fill bodybags in the Falklands, a place the Foreign Office had been discussing giving away to Argentina since 1946, when the election would have been lost otherwise.

It wasn’t the miners who were the enemy within. It was the lying media that chose to report one side and not the other, time and again. Back then, 30 years ago, a friend of mine worked for BBC TV. He was a young news reporter in the thick of a demo that was kicking off when he walked past a police van with the back doors open. It was full of guns. Not confiscated guns from arrested miners. The miners didn’t have any guns. These were guns the state’s enforcers had decided they’d take to the demo to shoot miners with. There was never even a public allegation that the miners had guns and what happened next showed that would have been all over the media if any government minister had even suggested it, or there was any police intelligence to back it up.

My friend saw the police guns. He had the camera. He didn’t switch it on. His boss said it wasn’t even interesting.

About six years after that a man called Michael Ryan went berserk in a small town and shot lots of people with guns he should never have been licensed to have, given the list of offences and complaints to the police that had been made about him. In those days it usually took about six weeks to get a firearms certificate. Ryan got his in a few days, for reasons that the police have never seen fit to discuss. But then, a lot of what happened at Hungerford isn’t discussed. One of the tabloids showed American armoured vehicles on the streets of this small English town, although since when Hungerford became part of the jurisdiction of Greenham airbase was never mentioned.

There was a rumour the SAS were involved in ending the proceedings that day. That a helicopter had taken off from Hereford and somebody onboard had sniped Ryan, which was at odds with the official version that he had shot himself. Pictures of the body were only shown in camera at the inquest. There was never, ever an official enquiry. But the media didn’t want to talk about that either. I met a man who totally legally built sniper rifles for a comfortable living. He sold them, perfectly legitimately, to armed forces around the world. So when someone came to him with some information that what happened at Hungerford was extra-judicial murder, the same way it had been in Gibralter, when IRA suspects had been gunned down in a carpark by the SAS, with photos of a neat high-velocity hole through a school window to back it up, he tried to get it made public.

My friend came and interviewed him. I was there. We all looked at the photos. I wouldn’t know one type of bullet hole through glass from another, but remember what one of us did for a living.

My friend made some notes. Went back to the BBC. We’re not going to run it. It’s ‘not in the public interest.’

So now you know. When your government decides to shoot people without a trial the BBC don’t want all the fuss of telling anyone about it. And the miners are supposed to be the enemy within. That makes sense to me.

Somewhat overshadowed

Not to be confused with sloightly on th’oof, whatever that bit of fake Suffolk dialect means this week’s Lifeboat Party show as slightly overshadowed by the fact that as of 16th December I become homeless. It’s not an experiment and I haven’t messed up my life more than usual for the rest of this year, although frankly that’s not saying much.

I’m selling my house. My stuff is going into storage and I have somewhere to live as of the new year, but right now, now, very now, as Shakespeare put it, I’m a bit stuck.

So I was a bit bothered about the show. We had a baking ukelele player on first, or maybe a ukelele playing baker, Martin Clarke, who had the decency to drop his bombshell half an hour after we came off air, telling me he’d been a radio presenter for 17 years. Yes. Ok. Cheers Martin.

Then I tried to interview Emma Thomson again, after I totally messed up the sound in her first interview. Emma’s plan to race cyclocross for Elmy Cycles in Ipswich, as well as raising money for cancer research ahs been a bit altered by the fact that someone has stolen all three of her bikes. These aren’t exactly the kind of thing that you can get in Halfords or Tesco, even if it is Christmas.

Just checking the recording now and I think it’s going to be ok.

Mega line-up next week, with not just Justine de Meirre but Buckshee as well. Check-out their sounds. See how down with the kids I am?

It’s going to (folk) rock. Sorry. Meanwhile I still need somewhere to live for jsut over Christmas. A dog is for life. I’m not. Ask anyone. Or actually, maybe don’t.

All Of Your S**t

Years ago I read an ad in the Personals. No, honestly, it really was years ago, although it’s probably time to start reading them again. There really was a real ad from a woman who took about a quarter page ad, telling everyone about her children and how devoted she was to them (as if anyone was asking) and how she would always put them first (as she should) and how nobody would get between her and them (as if they’d want to).

It just went on and on and on, as if someone kept suggesting the opposite, over her shoulder. I don’t know if anyone ever replied. I didn’t. The saddest thing was also the funniest thing, the very last line:

I’m looking for a man with no baggage.

It’s always stayed with me. So I updated it a little, in case that poor woman is still out there somewhere, still going on about her adult children. I should say now, this poem, if that’s what it is, is NOT based on or about anyone I have ever known, met, spoken to or done anything else with. Ever.

All Of Your S**t

I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage

I am a man woman couple looking for a fun

Reliable person partner soulmate

Who is tall short and dark light

Who is funny serious adventurous

And likes staying at home

And going out with friends,

Just chilling, doing the same things.

They say opposites attract lol.

I love my children, my home, my family

My car my job I would give the world

Lay down my life for or

Never forgive them or someone, for something.

I love my pets and

I don’t want any ties right now.

I like walking on beaches in the mountains.

I love going on Citybreaks in the countryside.

I want someone to be there for me

When I need them and I can’t handle commitment

Right now. I love having no responsibilities

And caring and going away

Whenever I like.

I love staying at home.

I am looking for a life

Partner a serious relationship

A one-night stand

Who knows let’s see. Fun.

I am married, single, divorced,

Separated, just looking.

And widowed. It’s complicated.

Delete as appropriate.

Delete as inappropriate.

Friend me. Chat. Txt. IM me.

Review my post and report me to Facebook.

Delete my posts on your timeline.

Remove your profile and change

Your privacy settings

Even as you change mine.

Forever and ever,

Or until the next time.

Mark me as flagged until that thing happens when

First the Xs disappear from your msgs

And quickly then the txts get shorter

And less often until sooner than you thought

There’s no reply at all and quite finally

Without appeal and irrevocably,

You just unfriend me.

So I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage.

(c) Carl Bennett 2013

Looking back I can see I posted this on November 28th. That was the day I went to the Blaxhall Ship and my life changed quite considerably.

You want to WHAT?!?!?

Ah. One of those things that make you go oooooops…..

I solved the problem of the phone not recording interviews or interview guests not turning up by not having any on the Lifeboat Party radio show I do this week. All of the people I’d asked either didn’t have projects ready that they wanted to talk about (and there are some really good local music things coming soon) or they suddenly found themselves really busy on Monday lunchtime.

I played the traditional Pink Floyd song Sheep for the local farming story, except it wasn’t really about farming even though it all happened near a farm.

I decided to ramp up the music a bit, hopefully getting rid of the allegations of the Lifeboat Party being the Slumber Party on Radio Snoozeshire. My rock advisor hasn’t talked to me for a week or so, so I played some of the stuff she’d talked to me about from memory, just after a story about the crinkle-crankle wall at Easton suddenly being 15 metres shorter after a car ran into it.

Closer

Nine Inch Nails. What could be more um, uplifting, yes? That should ramp up the energy a bit.

“Up next, Closer. Maybe they can use those Nine Inch Nails to fix the wall at Easton.”

Playout One slider up, Purple Microphone slider down. Lean back, breathe and look through the CDs I brought in while it plays.

You let me violate you, you let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you, you let me complicate you
Help me I broke apart my insides, help me I’ve got no soul to sell
Help me the only thing that works for me, help me get away from myself

Well. I think that’s ok so far. The penetrate word might be a little bit strong for a cold November Monday lunchtime, but nothing OFCOM can really complain about. I’d forgotten the next line.

I want to **** *** like an animal.

Um, that’s not actually sort of within the taste and decency guidelines, is it, for rural Suffolk? I mean, when somebody says the song is how they feel that’s one thing, but when you’re standing in your kitchen in Tingly Bavant wondering if you’ve got time to do oven chips for lunch it’s not really what you thought you were going to hear.

Still, it was sort of nice of someone to say that once. It would have been nicer if they didn’t feel that way about themselves.

Into the dark

“This is the sad time,” she said. “When you do that.When it’s that time of year again.”

She looked at the coat liner I was fastening into my Barbour. It wasn’t last winter. The one before. It’s been that time of year for a while now. It’s ten days since I saw zero degrees on the car thermometer in a year of strange weather. I had to put a down shirt on in June. I remember everything from that time as if it was fixed under glass, like this bright, clear, still day today, so shining and so cold.

A fine clear winter's day. — A fine clear winter’s day.

I knew what she meant. On the one hand we’d known some years,so we could remember other times when I pressed the brass studs of the liner into my coat, other Springs when I took the liner out again. But she meant the end of the year coming. The quickly shortening days when just not long ago it was light at ten at night, sitting in the summerhouse.

Today it was dark before five o’clock. Soon it will be dark at four thirty. But the end of this year is like every year. I don’t know what it’s going to bring. I said last Christmas I would not be in this house in a year, but this year, that will come true. I don’t know where I will be instead. Everything has seemed moveable, in flux and shifting.

It’s past Samhain, just over four weeks until the shortest day, December the 21st and then the days slowly, slowly start lengthening and long before the winter is over it’s getting light again in the evenings, so you can go for a walk at a reasonable time and soon, even if it’s cold after that, you can walk after work in the evening, with the rooks calling raw on the March wind. A time of paradoxes, just as Midsummer can be the saddest as well as the longest day, the day the year starts to shorten and wither, so slowly you can’t notice it until now, when each day seems to race the one before into the dark, so the shortest day, however dark it is, means that the days after will be longer, brighter. That there is hope, even in the darkest time of the year. That whatever happens, like everything else, the year, the days, won’t be like this forever. We’ve just got to get through until the shortest day. That’s easy enough, surely. Where will I be? The same place everyone else is, really. Nobody knows.

The Masque of Anarchy

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you.

Ye are many — they are few.

This is from Percy Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, written shortly after the Peterloo Massacre. Not quite 200 years ago people in Manchester held a meeting in a place called St Peters Field. They were some of the first generations who worked in factories, which meant more than a weekly pay packet. It meant a complete change of life. Nowadays most people expect to go to work and earn wages. Before factories, the majority of people didn’t. They worked on the land, one way or the other. They were paid in kind more often than not. A lot of people felt short-changed, and they were. Getting used to a money economy made many people victims; this was why the Co-Operative movement started.

People were short-changed politically too. Somewhere around 60,000 people had a meeting in a field. They didn’t think they were being represented properly by a government of aristocrats in London. The government did what governments often do when they realise the people they pretend to represent have a different attitude to the one they’re told to have: they sent the army in to teach them to shut up. At least 15 people were killed and 600 injured, but these were days before NHS trusts and ambulances and 999 calls and performance targets. Nobody knows how many were really hurt because it wasn’t properly reported.

They don't use horses and swords any more. Not much else changes. — They don’t use horses and swords any more. Not much else changes.

In exactly the same way the BBC isn’t reporting things now. On November 5th an event called the Million Mask March happened in London and other cities around the world. It had the same objectives as the meeting in St Peters Field; to protest a world where disabled people who for example, need a spare room for a dialysis machine have their housing benefit cut by 14% because they have too many bedrooms to suit the doctrine that there just are plenty of jobs for everyone, the playground tabloid obscenity of Skivers vs Strivers, promulgated by people who inherited millions and had jobs found for them by their relations. Ask the Prime Minister about that. Or the Health Secretary. Or the Chancellor.

According to the BBC this is 200 people. And Russel Brand.

On November 5th there was a traditional bonfire in Lewes, near Brighton. There always is. That’s why it’s a tradition. The BBC put it on their website. It took them another four hours to bother to report the Million Mask March gathering outside Parliament. When they did it was chiefly because Russel Brand, a known media figure had turned up.

It was shameful. No major UK news source carried the story while it was happening. I first heard of it on Twitter. Then Al Jazeera picked it up. The US airforce has bombed the Al Jazeera offices in the past, but that was ok because it was an accident, apparently. This isn’t me and my opinion; that story was reported by Reuters, the place where newsmen get their news.

Nobody was killed in Parliament Square on November 5th. Camera phones and Twitter are quite useful these days. But the Masque continues. Shelley’s poem talked specifically about the government of the day, the Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh who appears as a mask worn by Murder, the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth whose guise is taken by Hypocrisy, and the Lord Chancellor,Lord Eldon whose ermine gown is worn by Fraud. Led by Anarchy, a skeleton with a crown, they try to take over England, but are slain by a mysterious armoured figure who arises from a mist.

Arthur, the once and future king? Drake, sleeping there below until his drum beats again? Or the last thing left when Pandora’s box was opened, Hope, revived, who through the poem called to the people whose families weren’t aristocrats or tax advisers or related to former Cabinet ministers.

The Masque Shelley was writing about wasn’t a physical mask. A Masque was a ball, a dance where masks were worn. People who ought not to have done could dance with people they ought not to be dancing with, despite the fact that everyone in the circle invited knew who was who anyway. It was a pretence, a charade. A polite game where everyone knew that everything was not what it seemed to be and nothing was really what it was called. Democracy. Freedom. Objective news reporting.

Two hundred years on and the biggest difference is the soldiers don’t usually carry swords on horseback any more. It’s not enough of a change. But they are few and we are many. And it’s time we woke up and remembered that.