Ecoutez et repetez

Learning how to teach English as a foreign language is making me think about how I learned it. I can’t remember. Everyone around me did. It’s a problem. It’s made me realise something I first had an inkling of when I was supposed to be learning French at school; sometimes I don’t listen. I don’t always know when I’m doing it, or rather not doing it. I just know afterwards.

We had to write a list of names of things. I put le in front of every one of them. To this day I don’t remember hearing anything about masculine and feminine nouns before that, although everyone else in the class obviously had. Presumably, someone told them. I still have to look up the meaning of things like gerunds. I was never taught anything about them, including their existence. I don’t remember it, anyway.

The embarrassing thing, apart from everyone else knowing this stuff except me (yes, but I know stuff that other people don’t know, like the man who wrote Biggles came from Hertford) was that these were really ordinary words like chair and car and cat and for reasons that were never made clear, minkey. I think every French textbook family has had to have a singe in the house ever since Peter Sellers first essayed Clouseau back in about 1964. Which was even before I had to learn French. We learned by the example of la famille Bertillon.

Mr Bertillon was a douanier, which sounded to me onomatopaeically like a lorry driver but was in fact a customs inspector instead, a pretty exotic occupation in rural Wiltshire. His wife looked pretty exotic too, with a tightness of knee-length skirt that would have had lips firmly pressed together and arms folded across disapproving bosoms on the estate where I lived. They had two children, a dog, a cat and a minkey. Even more weird, they lived in a flat and went to the baker for bread instead of Gateway supermarket, one of several butchers depending what kind of meat they were looking for (ditto) and ultra-wierdly, made a big deal of going out to eat on Mr Bertillon’s birthday. I still remember him remembering one birthday dinner, each course as well as the Nuit St George, which I got the idea was a synonym for nights in white satin, or maybe Mme Bertillon.

Back then going out for a meal really was a big deal, but possibly rather less of a big deal in Trowbridge than Paris. We did birthday dinners too. You could go to the Woolpack or a pub out at Freshford that famously did food. The pub had a musician playing Harpers Bizarre covers and a stuffed monkey on a hi-hat stand that went up and down in time to the music. I do not know why. All of this was the reason it was such a strange and wonderful thing for Ben to go to Geales in Not Your Heart Away. The only fish and chip shop he would have known was the one you went to on the way back from school discos. They didn’t have seats, let alone a bar upstairs.

The Woolpack meant you wouldn’t have to drive as far. Drinking and driving didn’t come into it, or rather it did, but only on a practical level. Predictably for the times the Woolpack was a Berni Inn. That meant three things. Steak. Black Forest Gateau. A Mateus Rose by any other name.

I wonder now if there were English textbooks in France and what they put in them.

Mrs English: Is oven chips all right tonight? I got some of them faggots from Bowyers you like.

Mr English: But of course my darling. Ah, I remember that meal on my birthday! The keg Double Diamond! The crisps! The bag of chips on the way home. They don’t give you much in there.

Mrs English: Too right they don’t and no mistake. Mind, you don’t want to get done like you nearly did last time, when you went up on the kerb in front of that copper.

Somehow Mr Bertillon’s life seemed more, ‘ow you say. Like a life, really. I’ll tell you all about Bowyers faggots some other time.

Adder berries

When I was a boy I lived in the countryside, but I didn’t really know anything much about it. It had changed. We were surrounded by fields but we didn’t know what happened there. My friend Andrew lived the other end of a footpath past a field, Star’s Field, named after the horse I just about remember there, but one day Star went and shortly after that the field went as well. There’s a little row of shop for the estate there now. Adder berries grew at one end of the path. That’s what we called them. Everyone did. Adders do eat they, we were told. They’re poisonous.

“They’re poisonous’ was applied to everything that didn’t come from a shop. It wasn’t meant to be ironic, notwithstanding that a lot of the food in shops isn’t great for you at all. If you want to argue about that, have a look at the incidence of obesity and Type Two diabetes, two things that’ll mess you up big style if you overdo the Sunny Delight and instant meals.

Poison

“They’re poisonous” was applied to all mushrooms in every field as soon as older people who knew that all funghi are edible but some only once had the kind of jobs that meant they couldn’t be with children in the fields to tell them that St George’s mushrooms, the huge puffballs, should be cooked instead of kicked and that while just the look of the Avenging Angel will suck you in almost mesmerically, shining so pure and white it’s almost luminous, so will you be within a few days if you eat it.

It’s Good For You

So the thing is done. Whatever industrial chemical (farmed salmon has up to 27 of them) is in the food, not including our old friends aspartame or cancer-promoting saccharine (look it up if you don’t believe me, I’m tired of saying the same thing over and again), so long as it’s got a plastic wrap on it it’s Good For You. If it hasn’t it’s Bad. Just like adder berries. I’ve never eaten one. I’m not actually going to try. At least until I find out what they really are and what they do. Just the way no-one bothers to when they read the list of ingredients in processed foods. They’re fine, even when the makers put a label on them saying they’ll mess you up. Processed food is Cheap. Convenient. Hygienic. Good For You. And that’s official. Even when something is so toxic it’s banned until Donald Rumsfeld pulls some strings to get it made ok.

Bad is Good. Black is White. Knowns are Unknowns, or at least, Unmentionds.

Drinking at lunchtime

Back in the day, when that woman from the Darling Buds of May was still er, budding with Pop Larkin and hadn’t even met Michael Douglas who was still on the set of Wall Street, one of his lines was famously ‘Lunch is for wimps.’

Trickle-down Theory

He was playing Gordon Gecko, the character who also came out with the 1980s mantra, Greed is good and please let’s move swiftly on before all of us who were there have to admit how much we took that to heart. Gecko was the embodiment of the people who we now subsidise, the ones whose wealth mysteriously didn’t ‘trickle down,’ in theory or otherwise. Gecko did deals on a mobile phone the size of a housebrick, in his dressing gown, on the beach. Yeah, we all thought. That could be me one day.

Except for the lunch thing. Greed is good. Lunch is better.

The anti-lunchers tried to spin it as decadence (And your problem is, exactly?) and a loss of control. And that could happen. I remember going to lunch and being asked to order some drinks. Wine? Sure, you have whatever you like? She waited until the bottle was brought to the table and open before she said: ‘I don’t drink at lunchtime.’

It was presented as if I had a problem drinking when clearly I had no problem drinking at all, unlike the person who was going to lose control after two glasses of wine. Or said she would, anyway. Losing control of the amount she ate didn’t seem to be any kind of problem, but that was obviously a different story.

I never believed it. I’ve always thought if you can’t sit and share some food with someone, or at least a drink, there’s something deeply wrong with them. Life gets better when you sit and talk to people. Food makes a neutral, natural setting for that to happen.

And if I hadn’t been sitting having lunch with a friend this week I wouldn’t have bumped into someone I knew who also believed in the business efficacy of the working pub lunch, who’s just offered me some script-writing work and wants me to do a voice-over test.

Trust

Lunch is for wimps, is it? Missing lunch is for people who can’t be trusted.

And if you ever wondered where the darling buds of May thing came from it wasn’t just HE Bates. He nicked it from Shakespeare, who lived in Stratford on Avon, where I was born, where Ben and Claire and Peter and Liz in Not Your Heart Away went one evening a thousand years ago. It’s sonnet XVIII, since you ask.

Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

As we say down the Plough & Sail. Sometimes. It depends on the company.

Planned to fail

Odd Week

It’s been a strange week for my front door. I’m trying to sell my house. Apart from the front door it’s great, but apparently the front door has been cursed by a disgruntled passing gypsy or something.

I mowed the lawn last weekend. I’d almost finished when the mower started making a weird clattering gasping noise and pouring smoke like the Piper Alpha rig. Yes, I really AM that old. With split-second recall that had been oddly absent for the previous half decade I realised I hadn’t actually put any oil in it for the past five years.

Blow Up

I switched it off before it blew itself up. I thought I’d let it cool down for a half hour, find some oil in the shed. Trailer then. Car boot. Other shed. By that time about half an hour was up anyway. All this stuff takes longer than you think it’s going to. I put the oil in and pulled the string to start it and magically, it did without any clattering or detonations other than the 2,000 ones per minute it’s supposed to do. Result. But I had the feeling something was wrong. I couldn’t work out what it was until I went out that evening and found my front door in bits. Before I bought this house someone had replaced the front door with a UPVC one, that actually fits the doorway and keeps the draught out. Except being made like most modern things from plastic, snot and the tears of Chinese child labourers that’s about all it does now after however long it is since 1989.

First the letterbox fell off. It’s aluminium. Aluminium corrodes in rainwater, so it’s an especially stupid choice for anything you’re going to leave outside, where letterboxes are supposed to live. That wasn’t the problem if you don’t look at the letterbox flap. The plastic studs holding it onto the door had sheared off. I apologise for the technical, manly use of the word ‘sheared.’

It’s a guy thing

The plastic had broken because plastic degrades in ultra-violet light, the kind you get from sun-beds and inconveniently for people living on the third rock out from it in this solar system, the sun. In other words, put this door where it was designed to go and in less than a quarter century it will fall to bits. Brilliant. Superb. If you make replacement door bits. But hardly anyone does. The company that made the rubbish bolted onto this door went bust years ago, or more likely the owner sold it to China and went to live in Spain where he could complain about England being full of foreigners in more comfort.

My very oldest friend lives in Thomas Hardy’s sister’s schoolhouse in rural Dorset. Well, she doesn’t because it’s full of dry rot but that was nothing to do with the front door. The school house was built around about 1870, I’d guess, when education was made compulsory in England and Wales. Long before Anthony Crossland decided that the way to keep Old Etonians out of government was to deny the concept of academic achievement in the state system. Yes, that one really worked. Long before the idea that everyone should pay for everyone to learn to read was denounced as pretty close to Communism. A lot of changes have happened since that front door was put on. But it’s all still there. The letterbox hasn’t fallen off. The lock hasn’t come off in anyone’s hand, which was the next thing to happen.

Two screws went all the way through the handle, then the plastic one side of the door, through the lock and into the plastic and then the handle the other side, top and bottom. This isn’t too technical, is it? Both screws are the same. 4mm across, 7cm long. Except one of them is now 5cm long, because the end has broken off. Because it’s aluminium.

Can you buy 4mm screws anywhere? No, of course you can’t. We got fives, mate. Dunno where you’ll get fours. So I have to buy a new lock. The whole thing. Backplate, faceplate, two handles, the lock and two screws, because someone wanted to cut their production costs and use rubbish inappropriate materials to maximise their profit in the first place. The glory of consumerism. Use crap. Pass the cost to someone else. Buy more, buy more, buy more. Except it’s almost always just crap you’re buying.

With what I had thought was going to be its dying breath the mower managed to spit a tiny piece of gravel off the lawn and through the front door window. It left a tiny hole not even the size of the nail on the finger of a small child. And the whole glass panel crazed and cracked like a road safety advert. I liked it. Everyone who saw it liked it, but it was obviously building up confidence to fall out on the path and potentially onto whoever was opening the door at the time, so I had to get a new window as well. The mower spat the gravel because the gravel was there, but the reason it flew through the air when and where it did was because the bit of the mower that was supposed to stop things like that happening had rusted through. Because it was made of crap metal. Because it was made in China. Because it was like everything else now, just called ‘quality,’ just called ‘added value.’

I am stopping doing this. Not writing this, although maybe this morning I should and go and fix the mower. Buying crap. That’s something I need to stop. I don’t want to support this cycle any more. So I’m not buying a new mower. I’m not even going to buy a second-hand mower. Instead I’m taking the power back, taking responsibility. I’m going to fix the old one, with fibreglass. No, I haven’t done it before. I can learn. Anyone can. We can all do this stuff, not if we start believing but when we stop believing we can’t and we should buy it, the same way we’ve been told for the past 30 years.

The door lock is going to be a longer problem.

Rurality

Not Your Heart Away

“What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain. The happy highways where I went and cannot come again.”

Housman, The Shropshire Lad

You’ve seen it from a train window, like Ben on his way back from another desultory university interview in Not Your Heart Away. Or looking out through a car windscreen, once, twice, a thousand times and you’re still not really sure what that place is called. Even the time you sat down and looked at a map or Google Earth and worked out the place it probably is, you still know nothing about it. What it’s like. Who lives there. What they care about. Who they loved. You know now that you probably never will.

The spires are the churches that hardly anyone goes to because they forgot what they were for. When they were built they served not just as a place to worship but a place to meet, to talk, to tell stories, a village hall as well as a church. It was probably the one place in the village the squire’s word was only the second most important thing in your life, and the squire didn’t openly cross the parson if he had any sense. Not with all of Rome behind him. That changed, eerily like today. Something of one state was taken by a law decreed by another state. The friends of one kept quiet if they wanted an easy life and the friends of the second got rich. Nothing really changes much.

Change Happens

The farms did though. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks getting to know an old-fashioned farm a few miles from me. They need a business plan to change from being a hobby to a business, so I said I’d help. Because it’s been years since I was anywhere near a farm I’ve gone over and helped round up cows and do the non-milking parts of milking, to see what it is they actually do apart from worship Solihull LandRovers, like all British farmers and unlike all French farmers, who find a two-wheel drive van perfectly adequate for almost anything they ever have to do that doesn’t need a tractor. So I’ve been feeding. Cleaning. Fly-swatting. Walking. Moving straw. Hanging-up the salt lick. It isn’t what anyone would call a skilled job but it doesn’t do itself. And you can do an awful lot of harm by accident if you don’t keep thinking about what you’re doing. It gives you time to do something important though, watching the animals, seeing which one is feeding which calf. Which one that if you notice there’s something going slightly wrong in its life today needn’t cost you a fortune to sort-out next week.

It’s a tiny farming operation, just eight cows and four of them with calves. They only eat grass, no grain and because the soil is so thin down here on this edge of England and it hasn’t really rained for months the cows are being fed hay already, only just past half-way through the year, from big round bales that have to get up to the top field, the same as the salt lick does. Did you remember to bring a knife to cut the plastic off? Did you remember to put the plastic in your pocket? Because the cows are going to eat that if you don’t, and then they’re going to get the plastic stuck in one of their stomachs and that’s going to cost hundreds to fix, or a dead cow. So wake up. It’s not just about chewing straws.

Pushing back

The electric fences are old and sometimes there’s current in ones you were sure were off and no current in ones you needed to be on. You can’t lead a cow unless it’s got a ring through its nose. It’ll go where it wants to, so you need to think about what’s going to make it go where it wants to go. You can push it out of the way if you’ve got something to lever against like a cowshed wall and when you’re stuck between the breezeblocks and the cow you find a certain strength if you’ve any sense, before you promise yourself not to get stuck there again.

The milking machine only does one cow at a time, for the tourists who gather to see how it was done. The little ones are fascinated at the idea of a real cow just feet away from them, and they’d be more fascinated if they were left in the stall with the black and white rescue cow who came from a commercial dairy where by the way she acts the way to get cows moving where you want them was to kick them and flail them with sticks. Still, supermarket milk at 21p a litre to the farmer doesn’t get itself, does it? The old tourists remember, or say they do, but so often when the milk is warm in the churn and everyone is offered a taste the reaction isn’t ‘how delicious,’ which it is, but ‘yuk, it’s not cold.’ Tell me about the thriving food culture in the UK, the one you read about in every Sunday paper, even the tabloids. No, seriously. I’ll listen. I’ve got all day.

It feels like a land of lost content now, with the sun shining. It’ll be a different story of a March morning when the raw rain is sweeping in from the sea and the Spring won’t start. But it comes back to me again and again. One day maybe it won’t burn. One day.

One of those Facebook days

You know how it is

As the cliché goes, it’s complicated. We met about six months ago and argued about almost everything and about two months ago we came to an understanding. It’s very special. Quiet. Grown-up. A lot of the time we don’t say anything. Not very me-words at all. On Sunday we’d both had too much to drink and something was said I took badly. It was my ego that did it. What was said could have been true, just in the context it was said. I took it to mean in every context and I was hurt and upset. I did the stupidest thing I could chose out of my massive long list of utterly stupid things I keep handy, lightly oiled and ready for instant deployment for situations like this. I wrote on Facebook. I deleted it before I could send it. I wrote another, more restrained, much more bitter and pretentiously self-pitying version. I deleted that too.

Then I did a hugely uncharacteristic thing and thought about why it bothered me. The answers were pretty simple. Because I had drunk too much. Because I can see how it could have been true. Because of how I took it. Because of the stuff in my head. Because I was thinking like an idiot, projecting my own doubts and insecurities onto the words someone else had said and saying ‘you said that!’

That’s the trouble with words. Once they’re out you can’t decide what anyone else is going to think about them. You can say ‘I didn’t mean it that way’ but it doesn’t matter. Once it’s out you’d better hope the other person thinks the same way you do because there’s nothing else you can do but hope. You can’t decide how someone else is going to interpret your words. You can’t decide how they’re going to feel.

Brand New Degree

Once upon a time someone worked for me who as a brand new graduate said one of the most stupid, 100% gold-plated guaranteed just plain wrong things I have ever heard and trust me, I’ve heard a few: “I say what I like. People have to take me as I am.”

I don’t know what they teach in universities these days, but they don’t. People don’t have to do anything you think they have to do or say they have to do, unless they have a gun at their heads. Even then it’s still their choice, not yours. People don’t have to take you as they are. You don’t have control over what’s in their heads. But you need to be aware of what’s in yours.

So I didn’t send it. Nothing at all. Not even, ‘we need to talk.’ Because we really didn’t, not then. In the morning I checked to make sure I didn’t send the silly, petty, hurting, pathetic thing I’d thought, something more suited to coming out of the mouth of a fourteen year-old than the person I hope is me now. I hadn’t sent it.

Dead dogs in a skip

But it was still a shock when the same person sent me a picture of what looked like dead dogs in a skip on my phone. I thought maybe somehow my message had been sent after all. I thought it was a metaphor, or maybe just an indication of where I should end up along with the dogs for being such an arse. It wasn’t quite the Mafia-style horse’s head on my pillow, but it felt not far off. It was only when I went onto Facebook on a laptop that I could see the whole thing. The dogs weren’t dead although they were in a skip, tied up for transit in a way I can’t see the Royal Veterinary College recommending. The words that weren’t displayed on my phone were on a bigger screen explained what was going on, asking me to make it public.

I did more than that. I tracked down the phone numbers of the people who definitely know what was going on with these dogs and posted it, so they should be getting one or two calls around about now.

I think things are ok with my friend. I hugely hope they are. I really do try not to be a total arse these days. Mostly I think I avoid it. And I’m truly sorry when I don’t. I think I’m finally growing up. A bit, anyway.

Read all about it

I’m not from round ‘ere. Eerily like Ben in Not Your Heart Away, I grew up in a country town. Also like him, I don’t think I knew anything much about the countryside that I hadn’t got second-hand and decades out of date from Thomas Hardy or Housman. The process was helped by my school, the local C of E (it was just the school, not a lifestyle choice. People didn’t have lifestyles in those days) village Primary in Wiltshire, where we learned to read on Dick and Dora. Well, not me, my parents made sure I could read before I went to school. That said, Gibbon’s Decline And Fall was still a bit of a struggle. Dick and Dora wasn’t about co-eds in Minnesota at all, but a reading primer that I later found-out had been replaced everywhere else in 1949.

Well, not at Southwick Primary it hadn’t. It’s fair to say it totally warped my world view. Obviously every decent family had an Aga. Daddy went out to work every day, wearing a suit and tie (brown or dark grey in summer, of course. Why do you ask? Everyone knows that), slipping casually into a pair of flannels and a cardigan when he got home, invariably on time, by steam train. Daddy had a car with running boards and an income sufficient to keep Mummy at home in some style, long before our fetishisation of Agas and vintage cars felt stylish to anyone at all. Dick and Dora the children, (no, one doesn’t talk about contraception. Mummy and Daddy may well be and obviously are quite progressive in that respect, but one simply doesn’t) in their own turn looked after Fluff the cat (also eerily named after my cat, I think) and a dog. I can’t remember what kind of dog it was. Probably an Airedale or something similar, one of those sturdy dogs you used to see on wheels, pushed around as children’s toys. Well, I used to, anyway. It almost certainly wasn’t a Rottweiler or a trendy Iberian waterdog or a pit-bull, muzzled or not.

Chaps’s hats were expected to blow off in Spring gales as March roared in like a lion and went out like a lamb and somehow that was something to do with the lamb of god. Houses had fences around them, gardens provided eggs and vegetables as well as flowers and umbrellas (remember them?) blew inside out, usually in November, unless you were lucky enough to get one through to March, when the lamb/lion combination would mean another visit to the umbrella shop.

It marked me. In almost every garden I’ve ever had it hasn’t felt right unless there was rhubarb and mint growing and let’s face it, that isn’t the hardest stuff to grow on any rubbishy old soil. (Gardening tip: plant it. Leave it alone until it’s ready to eat. Eat it. You will have more rhubarb and mint than you know what to do with). One of the most pathetic things I ever saw was coupled with hearing one of them. The pub chef was walking down to the shop while someone told me what a great chef he was. When he came back he’d bought a jar of ready-mixed mint sauce. Obviously the pub had run out of vinegar, sugar and the bushels of the stuff growing practically everywhere. Maybe he’d read the new Janet and John books instead. I never have. Spiritually as well as at Southwick Primary, they were after my time. Childhood leaves its mark, good or bad. But adulthood is its own responsibility.

Wrong-footed

I heard there was a lunch at a club I belong to, but I wasn’t sure when or exactly where. I asked a friend who’s a member. She said she’d email me, at two email addresses she had for me, but I didn’t get either one. I emailed the founder of the club. Sure! Great to see you! It’s at this address, five miles away, noon Sunday.

My friend said she’d see me at the thing there in the afternoon. Did it go on after lunch? Did lunch sort of evolve into whatever was after lunch? Did I have time to cycle there so I could drink, or should I go and get petrol for something I had to do first thing tomorrow morning and the little yellow petrol pump has been lit up on the dashboard on and off for the past two days? And what to wear, anyway? It was an Arts Club lunch, so what do you wear that says “artistic’ that doesn’t say ‘old queen”?

I’ve nothing against old queens per se, except a firm belief that anyone’s sexuality is absolutely no business of anyone else whatsoever. I’ve always believed there was a lot to be said for the policy the US Army had towards gay personnel: don’t ask, don’t tell, not because it’ll frighten the horses but because it’s none of my damn business or anybody else’s who chooses to put what where with another consenting adult. But I still didn’t want to look like an old queen, so the ironic cravat was out. They don’t do ironic very well in rural Suffolk, even at the seaside.

Settled on an ironed check shirt instead, summer-weight trousers, suede Oxfords, light blue check Burlington socks (yes I know. It’s an ’80s thing. What about it?), silver Liberty cufflinks. Rejected the cotton jacket. Rejected the rather nice and now somehow improbably vintage Italian silk tie that was a hunting trophy from the ‘80s. (No sweetheart, when you give someone else someone else’s handmade tie you don’t get it back just because they remember where they left it. Call me unreasonable. And do your own explaining). Is it going to rain? Don’t know. Is there time to get petrol? There’s not going to be time not to, with a 6 am start to get raw milk to market tomorrow. It’s what used to be called a mixed and varied life, these days.

I was driving down the road when I realised I didn’t actually want to go to lunch. I don’t eat slaughterhouse meat and I’m not even going to start on about farmed salmon because I have other stuff to do this afternoon. And I was looking forward to the rocket, cous-cous, tomato-stewed beans, cos and lentils with sourdough and the humous I’d made two days ago and needed eating up in the comfort of my own garden while the weather holds, with the chickens and some wine and a book. Except someone came round unexpectedly last night and in the course of the two hours of the half hour she could stay for we somehow drank the bottle of wine that was the only one I had in the house. Chateau-bottled red, since you ask. Co-op. £5.99. Not as grand as it sounded, is it? Really, really very nice though, but maybe that was the company it was drunk in.

Got to the lunch predictably too late so didn’t go in. Saw that the afternoon thing was an outdoor jazz picnic (Nice!) with people trooping down to the sea carrying deck-chairs and picnic rugs. It was one of the only times I didn’t even have a sheet of plastic in the boot of the car let along anything more comfortable to sit on. So home after snagging a bottle of Duoro. Slight bridling at £8.99 until I reasoned that was two and a half pints of something much less nice in the pub. And while obviously the pub is there for more than just drinking we don’t want to attract too much attention, do we, two days in a row? So home, thinking about changing into stuff I can sit on grass in. The weather looks as if it’s thinking about changing too, hence lunch with myself. It’s half-past one. Pub’s still open. And what to do?

Clouded hills

I cycled nine miles to a friend’s farm the other evening to be there for a meeting at seven. We were going to discuss the business plan I’m writing for her, changing her experimental pastoral herd to one that can sustain a modest living for more than just the cows.

It was a sunny, late June evening and the back-from work rush-hour was starting in Butley. There must have been four cars altogether, two behind me and two coming towards me, one of them waiting to turn into the side-road on my left.

It was a little red car, about 15 years old by the P-plate. The woman driving it was a bit tanned, wearing shades with her hair in a top-knot. All the car windows were down and there was music blasting out. I didn’t recognise it at first. You don’t normally hear anything in Butley. When the Butley Oyster was open there used to be old photos on the wall, memories of a time when things ever happened in this tiny, usually silent village. The pub used to be confused with the Butley Oysterage at Orford, four miles away, famous for its food and when people from London phoned to try to book a table, the landlady, who never, ever served food, thought it was terribly clever and amusing to pretend she’d never heard of the Oysterage and that she had no idea what anyone was talking about. We simply roared. Odd that the pub is shut now. But like most of Suffolk, despite what the more moronic inhabitants like to pretend, it hasn’t always been like this at all.

The photos on the wall of the pub proved it. All of them in black and white, faded with time. One of them showed a crashed Heinkel in a field, a wrecked German bomber surrounded by British policemen, civilians and a man in un buttoned RAF tunic, holding a machine-gun from the aircraft at waist-level, pretending to be Jimmy Cagney over 70 years ago. The other photo I always noticed was from the same period, when Suffolk expected to be the front line and over-run. Especially this part of Suffolk. This whole area was off-limits to civilians for most of the war. Whole villages were simply confiscated and everyone told to leave for the duration. Iken was one, where thousands of Allied troops charged up the beaches of the Alde in practice for Normandy. Shingle Street, just a few miles away, was another and to this day, no-one really knows what happened there, nor whether or not there really was a German landing that resulted in hundreds of burned bodies being washed up along the shoreline. The photo showed the local Home Guard unit, the men too old or too young or too infirm for active service, kitted out in their uncomfortable-looking serge uniforms and re-cycled WW1 Lee-Enfield rifles, leftovers from the War to end all Wars.

There are lots of sad things about old photos, not least the fact that in any photo seventy years old, its likely that even the youngest people are actuarially likely to be dead. But there was always another sadness about this photo of the halt and the lame. The Home Guard were by definition the men who couldn’t join the regular Army. The sad thing was the number of them in the photo, more old and young, more men unfit for active service than live in the whole village today.

Suffolk more than many rural places has changed. The communities are fragmented. If you’re young you have to move away because there are no jobs. If you’re old you almost certainly didn’t make your money in the area and want to preserve the picture postcard fantasy that ‘it’s always been like this,’ without inconvenient children playing or teenagers snogging each others faces off in the bus shelter, thank-you very much. Without any motorways and a farcical, un-commutable railway service that means the 97 mile journey to London takes around two and a half hours, once the farms mechanised there simply wasn’t anything for anyone to do. The farms weren’t the bulwark of society people like to pretend. They got rid of the horses and got rid of the men who worked on farms. That got rid of the whole point of most of these villages. The people drifted away, apart from the ones too old to do anything except hang on in the twilight of rural zombie world until the end.

We will not sleep

The music was still hammering out of the little red car when I recognised what it was the girl with the top-knot and the shades was listening to somewhat unbelievably: Jerusalem. William Blake wrote the lyrics, one of the weirdest artists and poets who ever lived in the middle of London. I used to walk past where his house had been most days, just round the corner from where Karl Marx lived in a two-room flat writing so passionately about the exploitation of the proletariat that he got his maid pregnant. The song became the anthem of the Labour Party long before Blair re-branded it Tory-Lite (‘I’m Bombin ’ It’™). But it used to mean something, Blake’s Albion, the Labour-landslide 1945 generation’s self-reward for its blood sacrifice twice in what was so obviously not then an average lifetime.

Blake must always have sat uncomfortably with the buttoned-up church folk. Like Dickens, he only once saw a ghost and then one no-one else saw or had ever heard of. He and his wife once sunbathed naked at a time when most decent people didn’t even take their clothes off to wash once a week. And the paintings, the poems about tigers, the rays of sun, the tablets of stone, the amazement and the wonder that radiates from everything this strange man painted and wrote, the power of the imagery and the dark undertow beneath dull little rhymes about diseased roses and flying worms. All of this, belting out of an old Nissan in a country lane one Friday teatime.

That Sort Of Girl

It definitely is my age. I’ve been thinking about sex more than recently. Well, my age and other stuff, anyway.

Back in the impossibly long-ago days when Ben scored his hat-trick, having sex with (always called “sleeping with” when everyone knew sleep was not involved) three separate girls in a month and only one of them his official girlfriend, sex was supposed to be part of the revolution. In Ben’s parents’ world of doodlebugs and rationing, sex was something people did in wartime because they thought they might die the next day. After the war, when people regularly died from a host of things that would make headlines today such as tuberculosis or measles or smog in London, decent people didn’t until they were married, all through the 1950s. As the poet Larkin (not to be confused with Lorca, quite a different thing altogether) noted, sex began with the Beatles in about 1963, which was quite late for him.

Poppy’s happy, enthusiastically guilt-free bisexuality was illegal until she was ten years old in 1969. Or rather if she’d been born a boy it would have been. The story goes that nobody could think of a way to tell Queen Victoria that girls left on their own when their men-folk went out for a spot of peasant-shooting sometimes found novel ways to keep themselves amused so when male homosexuality was made illegal (man, how straight is that?) there was no mention of female hom0sexuality on the statute because it officially didn’t exist. Like most stories it’s probably at least half wrong. In certain circles an Albert is a male piercing with attaches the penis to the scrotum with a small chain. Its name comes from that of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. The reader may draw his or her own conclusions about how restrained the late Queen’s sex life actually was from that fact alone.

Of course, there were dangers. The biggest one was unpleasantness when a girlfriend found out their boyfriend was nobbing someone else, a devastating event which ended sometimes in tears and occasionally even outright public sarcasm. At least in Ben and Claire’s circles, the idea of attacking anybody because two people had got temporarily mixed-up about where one ended and the other began never crossed anyone’s mind. The other not-very-huge risk was clap, the joke non-specific word for what usually turned out to be Non-Specific Urethritis, a bit of an itch, a genital irritation which a ten-day course of antibiotics cleared up with no further ill-effects provided the patient remembered not to drink alcohol and took all the tablets. Unbelievably now, that really was about as bad as it got. There must, somewhere, have still been people with real, really mess-you-up sexually-transmitted diseases, but back then a lot of people thought the worst one you could get was marriage.

Sex was revolution. Sex was not being your parents. Not-death, a loose, wild, necessarily messy stain-on-the-HP sofa Richard Brautigan un-death, the totally naked rejection of the suffocating not-in-front-of-the-children, please-and-thank-you mind-your-manners Terry and June suburbia of the soul that no-body could be bothered to realise was the only sane reaction of a 1940s generation for whom heaven really was a place where nothing ever happened, because so much else already had. To their children, the Bens and Claires, Theresas and Petes, the Lizs and Poppies, each in their different ways unchained if not unhinged by free prescriptions of oral contraceptives, sex was kicking out the jambs, which had nothing at all to do with the Women’s Institute. Suddenly, nice girls did, enthusiastically, shamelessly, happily, almost entirely because they almost certainly wouldn’t get pregnant by accident. It was stepping over the traces, changing everything for freedom, if not for god, Harry and St George and in those days at least, freedom wasn’t just another word for nothing left to lose. Someone of Ben’s generation still believed at least one party had to say they loved the other one before they got their kit off; at least one of them was genuinely shocked when after they announced they were quite keen on a boy they’d met but didn’t know what to do about it another girl simply said ‘why don’t you just fuck him?’ It wasn’t Poppy, although it sounds very much like her. In fifteen years, half a generation, from the introduction of oral contraceptives the world changed from one where officially no-one did to everybody did. As Wordsworth said before Thatcher invented AIDS and condoms and girls who went to Art School, bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. And in that respect at least, to be young was very heaven.