Writer-insighter – Page 40 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

No Batteries Required

Listen to No Batteries Required here.

At the very end of 2012 I was siting in a pub talking to a man they call The Sausage King. I hadn’t wanted to ask for him by name in The Crown in Framlingham, but luckily I recognised him anyway. Which was something of a relief.

His hobby was and is sausages. For about ten years he’s been blogging about them before anybody else had. He rides a motorcycle around the countryside finding sausages and talking to people about them, writing books about them and making films about them. Because he does.

I’d had a food business and thankfully got rid of it before it got rid of me. Just. So we got talking, as you do, because although I came not to like or be much interested in the business, apart from getting rid of it, I’m extremely interested in food, where it’s come from and people who are interested in it. At the end of the second pint the bad thing happened. I had an idea. I’d known some stuff, as you do, the things I call the bones of the idea, the skeleton the meat hangs on.

The Bones

1) Battery cages for egg-laying chickens were banned on 1/1/2012. By March DEFRA, the government body that looks after farming, found that some chicken farmers weren’t complying with the law, so they set-up a special body to go and talk to them about why they should. If you try this with your road fund licence, saying that you don’t see why you should pay it and anyway you haven’t got enough money to buy one, then you get a criminal record and a fine. If you’re a farmer, DEFRA sets up a dedicated unit to explain the idea to you.

2) Kirsty Alsop was rumoured to be going to be made a government Minister by David Cameron if he won the election in 2010.

3) David Cameron and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall went to Eton and Oxford together.

Eton College class of 2000. I do not know anybody in the picture and resisted the temptation to make-up names like Oliver "Trumpy" Farlingaye-Bligh. — Eton College class of 2000. I do not know anybody in the picture and resisted the temptation to make-up names like Oliver “Trumpy” Farlingaye-Bligh.

4) Kirsty Alsop is Cath Kidston’s cousin. People like that know each other, one way or another. For a long time I used to know lots of people on the periphery of that world, which is one reason I sort-of-know-of-but-not-very-well lots of people, but not enough to be made a Cabinet Minister, unfortunately.

5) People in public office are well protected, however man-of-the-people they might appear to be. I remember being on a crowded commuter train in Blackheath Standard one morning with my face jammed into someone’s armpit. It didn’t smell. Much more scarily, it was hard with distinct edges. I didn’t ask to actually see the gun the big bloke in the nondescript suit was wearing, but I didn’t really think I needed to. He was like the man I talked to in the Sloaney Pony one evening back when the world was young, who looked like a librarian. Some girl had just been making fun of how boring he was and his dull job in the Civil Service before she swung her hips out onto the Green. He was in the Diplomatic Protection Group. Looking boring was his job. During the day there was a Sterling submachine gun under his mac.

The Idea

Wouldn’t it be funny if a chicken farmer went nuts because he was going broke and decided it was all Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s fault so he’d go and shoot him? Wouldn’t it be funnier if he did that the same day the Prime Minister decided to go and make his old school chum Minister of Food? What would happen if that happened?

And the consequence was, of course, that you have to actually write the thing once you say you will.

So I did. It became No Batteries Required, a half-hour play for voices that was the only thing I’ve ever written that kept the same title it started off with. I wrote Act One and got stuck, then four months later did the other Four Acts in about a week.

I sent it to the BBC who didn’t want it, so I found some local actors who did and we recorded it by coincidence again at The Crown in Framlingham, in the middle of December 2015, the day I was moving house. It wasn’t the best timing.

Then the difficult part, the sound editing. I didn’t have anyone to do it for me and like any of these things the first one is the worst and most challenging, because there’s a lot to learn. Even the most basic things in editing seem like huge hurdles until somehow, some time, you suddenly can’t remember when you couldn’t do them, or what all the fuss was about.

There are some things about the recording that can’t be fixed, because it was done on an iPhone (surprisingly good recording quality on those things, in fact) but we hadn’t thought to put it on airplane mode, so although the ringer was put on silent when a call did come in that next-to-the-radio dippada-dippada-dippada dip noise is all over the recording if you listen for it.

No celebrity chefs were harmed in the production of this play.

I used several tracks to record the different sounds and voicesand some are mixed too loud and some too soft. I sorted out most of the times I clipped words too shortbut there are probably still some there and there is rubbish left over at the very, very end of the recording after a two-minute silence. Other than that it’s fabulous.

Now I have to try to edit it again.

The PIN code was the funny thing. I made-up the least likely thing I could think of, the idea that when you’re stressed out of your head being attacked by terrorists and as the security services have all been privatised you’d have to remember not just a special phone number to dial but a PIN as well. A friend in the police read it through for accuracy and looked at me a bit oddly, even for someone in the police.

“How did you know about the PIN number?’

Apparently it’s not really secret secret, but it was odd that I knew about it. I didn’t guv. It’s a fit-up. It’s all porkies, like most of the stuff I write. And I’ve got to turn this into a screenplay now if that will be all, officer, because Cascade Studios said they want a look at it. Which is nice.

Chickens seem to be in the news at the moment. Or French porn movies anyway, which is arguably better.

Listen to No Batteries Required here.

Truth, Licence & Total Fiction

A tortured course

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

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

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

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

Except it didn’t happen

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

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

Because it’s fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

The Marine, whose eye is bright,

Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone: and now the Wedding Guest

Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man,

He rose the morrow morn.

Postscript

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

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

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

Another day, another passive aggressive episode

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

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

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

‘I’ve seen your poetry on Facebook.’

Oh, I said. Did you like it?

‘It’s shite. You know that anyway.’

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

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

Please Don’t Slag Me Off To Your Cleaner

If you cut me do I not bleed?

If you bleed me do I not cry?

If you hurt me do I not write poetry?

What did you think I would do?

Make something on my iPhone

And upload it to YouTube?

At my age? And anyway it’s all

Carefully anonymised

As we tacitly agreed

Except I’m hearing stuff

Coming back about me.

So I don’t think writing poetry

Is really any meaner than you

Bitching on about me to your cleaner

And yes, I heard about that too.

I went to the pub you used to go to;

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

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

You see? So if you’re going public

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

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

That isn’t the sort of thing

People like us do, me and you.

So I want you to listen to this, please:

While I say look, I don’t understand,

Let alone really know why it ended

But then, I’m a man,

But we made an agreement;

What we’d said that night was true;

Or I meant what I said.

I’m not sure about you, these days.

So you can moan about me:

I’m not stitching-up you.

And anyway it was only that one time

On the stairs. She was cleaning the shower

I was taking some air and I’d really forgotten

There was anyone there.

I mean really it wasn’t even a misdemeanour,

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

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

She’d been doing your shower.

I’d been washing my hair.

There really wasn’t anything happening there

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

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

It’s not as if we were doing anything obscene

Or anything. Really.

And obviously I fully realise

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

Time to start dripping selected juicy lies,

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

We’re all choosing weapons so pick your side now

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

But I can remember when our grass was greener

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

(c) Carl Bennett 2014

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

South Tower

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

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

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

South Tower, Aldeburgh

I was to put my hand here.

The fingers, knuckles and nails

Coloured blue, poster paint

Flaking from my skin,

Sloughed off. Instead

I listen to the wind,

The sound inside my mind

And try to listen to my heart.

Blue hands. Grey sky.

No poster paints outside my expectations.

Carl Bennett 2013

The play what I wrote

Hugely flatteringly if that’s a thing, people are actually listening to No Batteries Required on Soundcloud. I only put it up yesterday.

If you’ve got 34 minutes to spare you can listen too. It’s an everyday story of country folk, mostly, with some odd and debatably funny things in it.

Without giving away the ending, or the location of the Prime Minister’s tattoo (for security purposes, of course) it’s about a farmer and a celebrity chef. The funny things happened when I was writing it. I’d been thinking about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who screamingly funnily becomes Pew Farley-Toherstall for the purposes of the play. So far so so. But he really did go to school and then up to Oxford with David Cameron. And if not even David Cameron would be bonkers enough to make Jeremy Clarkson Minister for Transport, there were certainly very strong rumours that Kirsty Alsop was going to be offered a Ministerial post prior to 2010 and turned it down. And she really is Cath Kidston’s cousin. And her daddy really was chairman of Christies. So you can make your own judgement about her career progression dahn the auctions, as she almost certainly doesn’t say unless she’s very drunk indeed.

For me the funniest thing was the pin number on the Prime Minister’s emergency phone. I gave this script to several people to have a look at it before we recorded. A solicitor friend so that the caution was correct, when Tom is at the police station. An actual police sergeant, for some of the procedural stuff. She said she hadn’t been on a firearms job but it sounded about right. Funny. She liked it. Just one thing.

I hate it when a police person says ‘just one thing.’

‘How did you know about the PIN number?’

It’s not really officially secret, she said, but you’re not really supposed to know about it.

And the honest answer is, I didn’t. I made it up. It was the most ridiculous thing I could think of, the most British procedural thing I could imagine, the thing you’d be most likely to forget under stress, which would be the only time you’d need it.

So it’s a fair cop, guv. You’ve got me bang to rights. I’m done up like a kipper. But I ain’t got previous and it was the voices made me do it.

And as she said, in the best Jack Reagan tradition before I poured her some more wine: ‘Shut it.‘

No Batteries Required

No chickens were harmed in the making of this production.

It used to make sense to describe voice plays – plays using voices and not actions – as radio plays. But like my Lifeboat Party radio show ( oh, do you? Brilliant! Would you like a drink?) a lot of radio isn’t on the er, radio, these days. If you see what I mean.

I can’t call this a radio play, sensibly. Which leaves me uncertain what to call it. A play for voices sounds really pretentious, as if I had a pipe to go with my roll-neck sweater. And a beige one at that. Obviously that would be the pretentious version of me; mine’s black. Well, ok, two of them are black and one’s a very dark blue, the difference being mine are practical and cool, like me.

Anyway, the play what I wrote. It’s mostly based on fact. Battery cages for laying hens are now illegal in the UK. You can still stick 25,000 chickens in a barn, cut a hole in the door so they could get out if they could get to the door and weren’t already traumatised and call them free-range or barn but that’s not the point of the story. If there is any point to this comedy it’s simply this plain moral: if you say ‘I could write a play..’ on your third drink then you may well have to.

So I did. The voices were recorded just before Christmas in a session that was going brilliantly until I got a phone call that made me feel sick. New significant other (and it turned out, rather temporary sig. oth. Very significant. Very definitely other, now) demanding to know why all my stuff was all over her kitchen and what was I going to do about it. In a line that screams out to be used in one of my poems (Discuss. Starting with whether they are or not) she delivered the killer blow:

‘I’m so annoyed that I’m not going to say what I want you to do about it. I’m so annoyed that I can’t actually speak about it. So I’m going to end this phone call now.”

I thought I was good at passive aggression.

Actually, that really does deserve its own poem, doesn’t it? But first, enjoy No Batteries Required. It’s just over the half hour.

You can listen to No Batteries Required by doing that thing dolphins do, just here:

No Batteries Required – a play for voices.

Putting it about

Not like that.

Putting it about used to be a borderline smutty expression from the days when creepy uncles smoked panatellas and boasted about the two litre engines in their car while wearing lapels like an aircraft carrier for flies.

Add something as close to a Zappatta moustache as the Westbury Golf Club bar rules would allow and a vertical two-button waist on the tailored flares and you’ll know when we’re talking about, baby.

Everyone had a creepy uncle who thought he looked like this. It was the law back then.

Putting it about meant, in line with the mores of the times, not-so secret admiration for men doing it and public shame for women if they were. I won’t say ladies, because however many horseboxes they might have frequented at gymkhanas (gymkhanae?) ladies didn’t. Obviously they did, or some of them anyway, but it wasn’t discussed. Not if you wanted to stay in your tied cottage, anyway. It goes, or went, with the territory.

The kind of putting it about I meant to write about before we started the vintage shagging meme was cross-platform multi-media engagement. Or telling people you exist in the clamour of the global marketplace point para.

See what I did there? I’d been thinking of ways of trying to get some money in from doing my stand-up poetry in pubs I don’t actually like calling it poetry because let’s face it, it’s not exactly something Khubla Khan would have spent a languid afternoon listening to, and Omar Khyam (no, not the bloke

It doesn't get better. — It doesn’t get better.

who did those electric shaver ads on TV) has already done the book of verse, a jug of wine and thou thing that sums up the ideal state in anything I write, even though the dominant theme is being English, in a way that more people used to be than now, thankfully, fingers clenched dangerously tight on the stem of a wine glass as hearts turn to stone to stop them breaking, accompanied by nice accents, bright smiles and garden furniture. It could be I’m just channeling A Bouquet Of Barbed Wire in some weird Rendlesham Forest time-slip. I could live with that.

Two months ago yesterday I did my first stand-up poetry gig. Or songs without music. Or whatever it is I do (see snark, therapy, showing off). It seems like a lot longer and I keep veering between thinking ‘haven’t done enough’ and counting Anchor four times, Golden Key twice, DP’s twice, Old Mariner, Grinning Rat, King’s Head, Wenhaston Star, or twelve in less than that weeks and thinking that’s quite a good start.

When I started I thought a single reading might be quite enough for the audience, but they continue to surprise me in a really nice way. I overheard two women I know in the way you know women in pubs. Reading this perhaps I didn’t quite mean that, or rather I meant the way you (sorry, one) knows women in pubs to talk to. At my age. And theirs. With our voices. And stuff.

Anyway, as we used to say. One was asking the other about my stand-up act I’d done in The Golden Key, at Snape, asking what it was like. “It’s really good.” Pretty, Dutch, eccentric clothes, says hello to me first. Oh, it was nothing really. You know. Would you like a drink?

Pleasant all this may be I’d still been thinking I wasn’t doing enough to get stuff out there, or put it about a bit, as people thankfully don’t say any more. I hope. Not that, but I’d noticed that while there are loads of talented musicians at the gigs I go to, almost all of them never promote themselves. Not so at The Grinning Rat. That was refreshing, finding practically every act closing with its Soundcloud file address, Twitter account and website, almost down to saying how you have to shove the gate a bit when you open the latch.

Not exactly pulling gear. Even in Suffolk.

I’d read an American article about how to promote your writing for fun and profit or something and and marvelled at the crass vulgarity of the idea of taking your own books along to your gigs and actually telling people they could buy them. I mean! The idea! Really!

But it just makes sense. And it’s World Book Day. And I’ve got a book to sell. Oh, didn’t I mention that? I’ve got a book to sell.

I’m doing this gigging seriously. I like doing it. People seem to like me doing it, even if not the sort of people I thought would like it done. As it were. So I need to start telling people about my stuff. I’m finishing the sound edit on the new sound play No Batteries Required today. Then it goes on two local radio stations and Soundcloud for a start. Then I need to really get this cross-promotion thing going properly. And I need to do something about my stage image. Or maybe I don’t. This multi-media stuff is so confusing. I’ll just have a look on ebay for one of those scrolling LCD displays. You know the kind of thing they have in the post office to let you know the counter is free, only saying I am instead.

Note for younger readers: While most of this drivel is sadly true, there never was a golf club in Westbury. There may well be now, but back when the Triumph Stag was the pinnacle of smooth n sexy motoring there wasn’t. You can tell how long ago this all is by the piquancy of the idea that driving anywhere could be sexy. Or that anyone would use the word ‘motoring.’

Judging by appearances

It’s a stupid thing to do, but pretty much everybody does it. It’s how we spot the tiger in the long grass, how we look for the shorthand tell-tale signs and tribal marks that used to tell us ‘this stranger is safe’ or warned us not to get too close too soon.

How average people dressed. — How average people dressed

In black and white films at least, things were straightforward. Proper chaps wore hats, or as their womenfolk called them at the time, hets. That was some time ago and all of those pointers and signs changed a while back. Most days I wear a tweed coat (one does not say jacket, actually) and jeans along with Goretex-lined walking boots, a combination my father would have found baffling. He was never socially confident enough to wear tweed, and denim was something engine drivers wore in those days. And Goretex hadn’t been invented.

The thing is, I make as many assumptions about people based on what they wear and how they sound as anyone else. People make assumptions about me based on my voice. Most of them assume I used to have some money because of it, which isn’t even vaguely true. Last weekend I was freezing because I hadn’t had much sleep so when I went down to the Suffolk Arts Club I threw on anything warm I could find. A grey sweater with red hearts on it from TK Max. A long Musto stockman’s coat that’s kept me dry since 1991. Same old jeans and boots. And a scarf. And two people I thought knew me a bit said they could see I was wealthy due to the clothes I was wearing. Wrong. Flattering, but totally wrong.

Just as wrong as I’ve been about the audience for the stand-up poetry I’ve been doing. I did my 12th gig tonight, two months into this, at The Grinning Rat in Ipswich. I got there late because I hadn’t even decided to go until about nine o’clock when I finished work and by the time I got there it was almost empty apart from a small group of loud people drinking at the bar. Hurrah, I thought, exactly the audience I like, drunk and shrieking at each other at random. And if I’d made more sensible assumptions I wouldn’t have been surprised when after I’d done my set a woman from the group came over and touched my arm and said ‘thank-you, that was lovely.’

Somehow it's never girls like this that touch my arm and say 'thank-you.' — Somehow it’s never girls like this that touch my arm and say ‘Thank-you. That was wonderful. Take me home with you.’

It’s never the sensitive-looking girls. It’s never the artistic-looking men. Always but always it’s the toughest-looking men and to be frank, women, who make eye-contact during the set or at the bar afterwards, who come over making me ask myself ‘what did I say?’ and tap me on the shoulder or physically stop me leaving the pub. And just as I’m thinking ‘how do I get out of this and what was it I did that’s got me into this?’ they say odd things I’m not expecting.

‘We need more spoken word. Are you coming here again?’

‘You’re like me,’ from a skinhead with a pit bull terrier.

A silent thumbs-up in my face that I thought had been going to be a punch.

I’ve had a tough-looking rockabilly girl massaging my shoulders while I drank my pint, then giving me 20 minutes on why her relationship was so troubled. She didn’t want me to do anything about it, she just thought I was the sort of person she could speak to, after my poetry that I don’t even think is real poetry, just smart mouth and anguish and a couple of rhymes. Almost therapy, at times. You see what I did there? Smart mouth, as I said.

And they touch my arm. This is what I really don’t get. It’s always the same. Apart from one tap on my shoulder to get my attention (I really thought I was going to get punched that time) and one hand on my chest to stop me going through the exit (that wasn’t much fun in expectation either) huge blokes and hard-looking women come and do the same thing: they both touch my left arm (always the left one) above my elbow. Always. I don’t get it.

A lot of the stuff I do is about being upset. With a couple of the poems I sometimes have problems with a couple of lines if I’m thinking too much about why I wrote it in the first place. Maybe it’s therapy. I’ve certainly noticed that when I start to feel ok about things after being dumped (again) I can’t think of much to write about. But it gets through to the wildest, toughest looking people, people who don’t have voices like me, people who I thought from the way they looked would hate what I do, standing in front of a microphone with foppish hair and a voice like mine.

And more fool me, judging people from first impressions and appearance. Just more fool me. These strange, tough-looking people who look as if life hasn’t been its kindest to are my biggest fans. So I’m going to try to stop being an arse and wait to see what people are like before I judge them. The same way they have the grace to reserve judgement on me.

Sunday, Sunday

Can’t trust that day, as the Mamas and Papas nearly sang. It’s a special day today, which makes me wish I’d had more than two and a half hours sleep and didn’t have to fix my freewheel on my bicycle, which seems to be all crudded up as it’s come out of winter storage. It runs, but if you stop peddling the chain threatens to come off because – oh it doesn’t really matter because. I’m going to have to take the stupid chain tensioner on the derailleur apart, thinking as I do every year that the complete evidence that my life has gone fundamentally totally wrong is that I can’t afford £900 for a 14-gear Rohloff gear hub for my bicycle. Res ipsa loquitur, as if I’d said for a living I’d have one by now. It speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Ha ha. And bitter tears.

If I hadn't thought about Wendy Sedgewick I'd have one of these by now. — If I hadn’t thought about Wendy Sedgewick I’d have one of these by now.

Oddly, I think of new things when I’m short of sleep. Two new poems, one of which I might try out at the soiree (I know, get me) this afternoon, and remembering I actually have not one but two short stories of a readable length I could do either there or at the pub open mic at The Anchor afterwards.

First I need to get some sleep and fix my bike, but I could get the train one stop instead and cadge a lift back, I suppose.

So would you like a story? Would you? Have you been good? Ok, what story would you like, because we only have time for one before bedtime? What’s it going to be? One about a ghost cat? Or about a teenaged Mexican prostitute I met once?

Sorry? I didn’t say these were children’s stories, did I?

Being English

It isn’t easy being English. It’s not just the clothes you wear. Sorry, one wears.

Nor the things you think or the way you see things or the way you speak.

But when you hear it, especially when the English talk about relationships – sorry, not a very English word, I meant things like that – you know you really couldn’t be listening to any other people. Especially when you realise that when we say sorry we actually mean pay attention. I meant one means. Sorry.

I drove past someone’s house this morning and had a look to see if the garden furniture was still where I’d put it and the pergola was still there. And I thought of this. I don’t know whether to call it Being English or Things Like That. Or People Like Us, but I want to use that for something else and besides, not all of them do.

Things Like That

It was all quite straightforward.

We both knew

Where we were.

We sort of got along.

Like that.

We liked each other.

Quite a lot rather soon.

That way too.

And then well.

You know.

All sorts of things happened.

And before we knew

Where we were at all

That was it really.

Now I just look

To see if her car’s there.

If you see what I mean.

Thinking back I’m not sure

Either of us did at the time.

Pity.

Actually.