Writer-insighter – Page 51 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

The curse of big words

I officially heard it all today. Read it, anyway. It’s finally happened. I knew it would one day. After this – I’m not sure there is an ‘after this.’ I read the most stupid, conceited, 15 year-old know-it-all gee-mom-thanks-for-the-psychology-textbook-guess-I’m-a-psychiatrist-now thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some. And that, as we used to say, ain’t no lie.

Desperado

It’s Saturday morning. I just got some tea and sourdough toast, some not-very-nice figs (I didn’t get them because they were’t very nice, they just weren’t) and a bowl of rhubarb stewed with ginger and went back to bed to write, because I didn’t want to start the cleaning and clearing and all the stuff I have to do today quite yet. The Eagles were playing on the radio. The Eagles have been out riding fences for so long now that you can’t really tell which of their songs is which until you stop and listen carefully. You just know they can play, they wrote their own stuff, didn’t use a rythym machine, the lyrics mean something and one of these days you’ll stop and listen and find out what they are.

After a few seconds of listening I looked up one of those lyrics-with-meanings websites. I should have known better. You get those days when it seems as if the whole interweb is written by a teenager living with their parents in Ohio, my shorthand for someone whose worldview is incredibly circumscribed but officially knows everything there is to know about everything, on account of he’s not paying the bills and shucks, all them cornfields cain’t be wrong.

Lying Eyes

City girls just seem to find out early
How to open doors with just a smile
A rich old man
And she won’t have to worry
She’ll dress up all in lace and go in style
Late at night a big old house gets lonely
I guess ev’ry form of refuge has its price
And it breaks her heart to think her love is
Only given to a man with hands as cold as ice

Luckily, thanks to websites like this we can share Traynor or Chuck’s insights on what the Eagles really meant with all the collective wisdom Moose Droppings, OH can muster. She’s got Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you see? She could benefit from some counselling, quite a lot of it. It’s people like her Mental Health Awareness Day was set-up for. She’s ‘phony,’ a word I haven’t really heard since Holden Caulfield got drafted to Veet Naym.

She gets the wanted attention that she so misses in her NEW relationship. This new person is so wonderful and all the feelings she remembers having in her “old” relationship are coming back. However what her narcissistic personality fails to understand is that these feelings (as nice as they are) will be temporary. Relationships grow and as beautiful as the guy thinks she is, telling her how wonderful and great she is everyday gets tiresome. Again, it’s all about her and he will realize this in time or just become a doormat.

So now you know. Obviously Traynor hasn’t got to the chapter about projection yet. That’ll be a good day. He’ll probably be listening to Take It To The Limit.

The past is another country

Google Earth is a strange thing. It gives the idea you’re looking at the here and now, but like any photo, it’s just a snapshot of the past, however many colours there are, whatever angle you look at the picture. The wondrous thing is once you have an address practically anywhere in the world you can see what someone’s house looks like, see the rake or the plastic broom they left outside, see the things they see when they walk down the street. But when? You don’t know exactly when.

For all the redacted car number plates, the weird Germans getting out of the boot of a car naked (yes, Google Earth snapped that picture one particularly German day) and the occasional man wearing a horse’s head it’s not now. It’s then. One of the most vivid ways of imagining it, checking out other people’s lives as well as places, but still then, not now.

I think that’s the attraction for me, of the past. You know how it ends. It’s one of the themes, maybe the main theme of Not Your Heart Away. It’s preoccupying me now I ‘m trying to start the sequel, not the past, but the idea of the past. And that’s the thing about it – you know how it turned out. When you look at the house you stayed in, when you follow your drive to work that summer, down the hill, over the railway crossing, down into the old town, you know what happened next. You know what became of you. You know who you were, as well as who you became. You know how that part ended.

A Voice Of Their Own

“The characters just had a life of their own. They wrote the book, not me. I don’t know where they came from. I had one idea in my head for where the story was going, but they changed it. It’s as if – as if they were somehow speaking through me.”

Ever read this? I have. It’s rubbish.

Statutory plug for Not Your Heart Away

When I was writing Not Your Heart Away I wanted to make sure the three main female characters, above everything else, were not just believable but equally importantly, different from each other. It’s one of the hallmarks of rubbish fiction that however many people appear in the book they have just two voices, one male and the other female. Often that means those two say pretty much the same things too, except one of them twists her ankle when she’s being chased by a lion and has to be rescued. Hey, this is MY story, ok? Write your own if you don’t like mine.

I was paid an odd compliment yesterday: ‘If I didn’t know you I’d have said whoever wrote it was gay, because he knows what women think.’ Odd in two ways, I thought. First a sad comment on my fellow Suffolk metrosexuals, or as this is a predominantly rural area maybe retrosexuals would be more appropriate. Maybe that’s what she meant.

Secondly though, I can’t remember ever writing a single word about what any other character except the narrator ever thought about anything. It’s a first-person narrator story – Ben can’t think about anything anyone else thinks because he has to be told it or see it. Aside from the format of the form, he’s supposed to be 18 or 19. Of course he can’t think what anyone else thinks. Especially girls. He can barely articulate what he thinks himself, for heaven’s sake. But flattering anyway. And almost as odd as the person who told me she admired the book as a treatise about the way women face choices in their lives and reach crossroads that decide who they are going to be. Er yeah, that’s what I hoped it would be. Allow me to pour you some wine?

But rubbish as the idea that the characters had to tell their own story is (ok, let’s see them do it. Come on. I’m waiting), I know what the idea means, that they decide what’s going to happen. Except they don’t. It’s the way they speak.

The Uses of English

Somebody wrote that an Englishman and by extension woman, only has to open his mouth to make another Englishman despise him. I think despising is too strong a word for it and quite un-English in itself. Making another Englishman say ‘really?’ is quite damning enough. Even better these days, you can get them to repeat their nonsense on Twitter if you put your mind to it, so everyone can see. Only one of the characters in NYHA speaks with anything much approaching an actual accent, although another one is afraid they might do. Mostly they speak like totally normal young people, not very rich, not very poor. Where words are used as weapons in the book it’s mostly as a defensive mechanism rather than an indicator, conscious or otherwise, of social class.

But they all had to have individual voices. That’s where ‘they took it over’ comes from. Whatever the story, in a dialogue-lead novel where the things that are said are much more indicative than the things that are done, there being very few helicopter gunship shoot-outs in the book now, it has to be the words that matter. The phrasing. And once you’ve got a character’s phrasing in your head that’s the only way they can speak. That’s what leads the story down a track you maybe hadn’t thought of. A character can’t say something except in their own voice and unless you want to go down the Raymond Chandler route you just have to trot after them and nudge them round to where you wanted them to be, but not so hard you make them speak like someone else.

What ‘they took over and their words just flowed out of me’ means is simple: it took me three days to get that character back to where I’d planned they were going to be, because I couldn’t be arsed to rip-up what I’d done and start again. And they were speaking in character and real life isn’t linear very often. Not as often as we’d all like to pretend, anyway.

Raymond Chandler had the advantage of writing about violent murderous drunks, after all. Whenever he got stuck down a dead-end in the text he just had someone kick the door open, holding a gun. Maybe I should try that, next time.

Learn to play the saxophone

Back in Wisconsin – it’s not a bad start, is it?

Actually it’s not a brilliant start if you know Wisconsin. Nothing much happens there. It’s a land of lakes, America’s dairyland, full of pine trees, water and mosquitos, empty roads and rain clouds a lot more of the time than I expected that summer. A place of big old wooden barns on farms that looked like something out of a child’s picture book, or the American picture books I grew up on, anyway. Hexmarks cut into the lintels told an older story, one the Scandinavian settlers brought with them in the 1800s when they came to clear this land.

Like any country place, there wasn’t much there. The local people were either desperate to get away or sometimes just desperate, trapped and often as not contemplating a lifetime of temporary jobs and drunkenness, pretty much the two options available when some of the lakes had eight feet of snow of them four months of the year.

I saw an elk there, splashing through the shallows near an island I’d sailed too, so impossibly huge it was like a dinosaur up close. On land I wouldn’t have got so close. Writing this is bringing a lot of memories back, so much I nearly wrote gotten.

I was on summer camp. I went there to teach children to shoot because I couldn’t find a job in England that summer. I didn’t want to join the Army or be an accountant or a solicitor and where I lived there didn’t seem to be much else to do as the factories shut and the ordered world my parents talked about seemed to be as credible and real as anything else parents ever say, which in my house wasn’t much. For eight weeks six days a week I drilled the basics of not shooting yourself or anyone else by accident or design into groups of five children, aged between eight and sixteen. I bought a twelve year-old Chevrolet and tooled around the backroads like a Springsteen refugee, sometimes with one of the counsellors from one of the other summer-camps nearby. Where I grew up we sometimes had Max Boyce singing how the pit-head baths were a supermarket now; if I drove around Eagle River today I could reflect on how Nancy-Jean was a professor of performance art now and won awards for her story-telling children’s books. The difference seemed significant to me, then and now.

The time and place for Nancy-Jean’s story and how I drove down to Indiana and cleaned up a sawmill the wrong side of the railroad tracks isn’t now; now was when I started to learn to play the saxophone. I had a friend on camp called Mel Taylor. I still can’t find-out what happened to him. He came from Kentucky where every boy learns to shoot and fish the same way you learn to tie your shoelaces anywhere else. His uncle made speedboats and played the saxophone. He’d loaned Mel his old one to take to camp, see if he wanted to learn to play it. He did a little, I did more, so a few afternoons a week I’d borrow this old tenor sax and take it out to the shooting range after we’d closed, or out into the woods beyond if I was feeling more uncertain about the sound than usual. Mel was able to show me how to put my lips on the mouthpiece, just about and the rest was up to me. I had a load of Glenn Miller songs in my head, along with Dexy’s Midnight Runners and the Motel’s Total Control. It was a long time before I could even think about having that over anything I played.

I wanted to come back to London and join a band, maybe stay with a friend in Camden while I worked the pub-band circuit, drinking Scotch whisky all night long and playing just what I feel. A foggy wet winter on Eversholt Street was a lot different to anything Steely Dan had in mind though, as I knew already.

That’s how it started. It’s still going on. There isn’t anything much about saxophones in Not Your Heart Away, except I kept playing Kate Bush’s Saxophone Song while I was writing it. I kept hearing that sound in my head for pretty much always. You’ll find me in a Berlin bar, in a corner brooding. You know that I go very quiet when I’m listening to you summed-up a lot of that book, listening to my memories, listening to ghosts of the past and the future. That’s just what I feel. I’m still learning to play it. These days it’s a 1924 Martin Low Tone.

The Riddle of the Stains

Once up a time proper chaps and chapeseses spoke in RP, the BBC’s Received Pronunciation. Or we were supposed to, anyway. It was designed, created, invented even, when for the first time everyone in the country was being spoken to and could actually hear the words back in the 1920s and ’30s, when radio ruled. It wasn’t about snobbery, which is easy to assume now. It was about mass communication, a common pronunciation designed so that everybody could understand it, whatever their accent.

It doesn’t come from anywhere. That was the whole point. It blends aspects of lots of different accents into one. Like any other accent it became exaggerated for better or worse into the strengled viles Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard used in Brief Encounter, which tragically, still does it for me. It was interesting at the university reunion last weekend to hear how many people were using it more or less, although none of us would have admitted it without water-boarding. Despite that, I tried to keep extreme accents out of Not Your Heart Away. Nobody’s commented on them yet, anyway.

I was talking to a friend about the general rubbishness of estate agents, the sort of conversation Celia and Trevor would have been quite at home with.

“Yes, I see thet.”

Splendid! The whole reason I was thinking about this at all was due to an estate agent, or rather remembering the way she spoke when I was selling a house once, back so long ago that you could actually (a) sell houses and (b) make a profit doing it! Rarely! It was true!

I’m not jaking!

Even then the estate agent woman was something of an anachronism. She didn’t just have a tartan skirt, but also a huge chrome safety pin for it, the sort of rig I’d never actually seen on anybody over six years old. She could safely have put a couple of decades onto thet.

The house was a bit of a wreck when I bought it. We moved the bathroom down a floor, put another one in upstairs, moved the kitchen from the middle floor to the ground floor, made a study and treated and re-stained the wooden beams in the kitchen, which is what I assumed the estate agent woman was talking about. She seemed keen.

“Rarely like the stains! Did you do them?”

Yes, I said, after I did the woodworming.

Rarely? You hed woodworm thar?

Lots of it. All fixed now. So of course the wood needed to be made to look good after that.

The woman looked at me to see if I was trying to be funny. She looked at the wall and the mullioned windows, the way the sunlight caught the mellow Cotswold ashlar masonry blocks and turned to me again.

Nay! The stains!

Ah. Ok. The ones they dug out of a quarry a long time ago. No, they were already there. For the last 300 years and more.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have something in my eye.

The smell of freedom

Patchouli used to be the smell of the tribe. It’s a dark, earthy smell that’s hard to describe because it meant so many things. There’s a coldness to it too, along with the warm, fuzzy buzz it puts in your head, the feeling it puts in your heart that for once, just this once, we could have a revolution without blood on the streets.

Well we had a revolution. It was called Thatcherism. It wasn’t much to do with patchouli and there was blood.

I tried to get some patchouli in Bath two weekends ago, to fly the flag when I went to a university reunion. Bath didn’t have any which was odd where they may as well have crop-dusted the whole city with the stuff once upon a time. I got some patchouli massage oil in Body Shop a few years ago but that’s another story. It’s not the same.

That smell was how you recognised the tribe, a not-very-secret code. The police and Drugs Squad and Customs officers always assumed it meant you were in possession of a controlled substance. I got made to turn my bag and pockets out on the street in Bath when I was stopped by two plain clothes officers whose hep-to-the-jive antennae told them ‘if you’ve got patchouli then you’ve got dope,’ as Poppy said in Not Your Heart Away. Like any assumption, a lot of the time it was wrong. They’d have been better-off targeting people who drank milk. Some did, some didn’t. In itself, patchouli was nothing to do with it.

Head Shops

After ten days of being more oddly disturbed than usual after that weekend, remembering someone’s incredulity when I said I’d only used two aftershaves in the past ten years, I decided to fly the flag again. I went to buy some patchouli.

There aren’t those little head shops where I live in rural Suffolk, nowhere the whole shop stinks of the goatskin-soled knitted slippers that might keep your feet alternatively warm or might equally give you anthrax. Nowhere with brass bells on strings and a wall full of dried beans and joss sticks and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics and tiny Chinese porcelain bowls. There probably aren’t any shops like that anywhere now. I remember when there were.

jugual — One of the all-time great albums. Click it and see.

There was a gallery and gift shop in Woodbridge that had a suspicious number of dangly things that might be mistaken for mobiles hanging from the ceiling when I went in yesterday. The blond woman who ran the shop was about my age. I hung back a bit while she was trying to sell some tourists a painting of the quay. After they’d decided they were really nice pictures but not quite nice enough today I asked if she might know anywhere that sold patchouli, for the first time in decades. She was out around the counter in seconds, eyes darting from side to side. Old habits. I might as well have asked if she had any king-size strawberry Rizlas and a lighter.

“This shop used to be a chemist. People sometimes think – But no. We have some joss sticks. I might have some patchouli ones. Cinnamon. Amber. No. No patchouli. Nobody’s asked for that for years. That used to be how you knew, when I was a teenager!’

It was. What it was we knew we didn’t really know. But we knew. We didn’t know where to find any, either of us. Maybe The Purple Shop in Ipswich, she said, but it sounded exactly like the mythical Purple Shop in both our heads, too good to be true and guaranteed if it actually did exist to be closed when you got there. Not worth the drive to find out. It won’t be there anyway. Maybe it’s our age.

You can still get that smell, now and then, if you try. It’s called an essential oil now, but it always was. I eventually got some in Holland & Barrett’s aromatherapy section. They said it would help me relax. When I got home I unscrewed the top and held it under my nose and was about as relaxed as if I was caught in an avalanche that hurled me straight back to the Walcot Nation in my mind, before the picture framers and bathroom galleries moved in. Somewhere very precious where we can all go only for a little while, with the right kind of nose and one sniff of patchouli.

The shining plain

Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows. What are those blue remembered hills? 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.

I can’t really remember when or where I first heard Housman‘s A Shropshire Lad. That’s as it should be, indefinite, always there, underneath everything, the landscape in my heart.

The rest of the poem goes on a bit, but those lines come back to me again and again. I’m not from Shropshire and those lines weren’t written there either, whatever Claire thought in Not Your Heart Away, if ‘thought’ isn’t too strong a word for her off-her-face recollections one evening in a mythical country pub.

The pub I described in the book really did exist once, making it a real land of lost content. It really was called the Red Lion – I’m not an imaginative writer. It was made of stone in a village that once used water from the nearby river on the very edge of the Mendips to power a mill that made broadcloth, the stuff (and it was properly called ‘stuff’) that made hunting pink riding coats and billiard table covers, wool that was teased out with teasles, hence the name, then cropped with eight-foot long shears worn around the waist then hammered flat over and again until it was dense, hard-wearing. It all ends in the beginning though, that story. The whole point of the mill was to provide power and once that walk starts it ends with the shearers replaced by machines, as Thomas Helliker, our local martyr found.

The Red Lion

But we didn’t know any of that in the Red Lion, not then. The only food they sold was crisps, Kit-Kats and Mars bars, the way country pubs always used to. Then peanuts came along and the rot set in. The next thing was the amazing thing, the Star Trek invasion. Somehow the Red Lion owner got hold of probably one of the first microwaves in the universe. It only cooked one thing, plastic-wrapped cheese and onion sandwiches that were microwaved in the bag. People used to watch it being done, the microwave machine behind the bar where everyone could see it. We made our own entertainment in those days.

Someone tried to organise a school reunion ten years ago and phoned the Red Lion to see if we could hold it where we’d spent so much of our school time, at least in the evenings and weekends. There was a big fireplace, a door at the front and another, the one everyone used, at the back leading into the car park that was more like a little wood than anywhere you’d leave your car now. It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Nobody bothered anyone. You could have a conversation if you wanted one and be left alone if you didn’t. On Friday and Saturday nights it was literally wall-to-wall people in all three rooms of the pub. Cars were borrowed, crashed, had their rusting sills ripped off on the stones that bordered the grass, abandoned with the doors open and lights on and even sometimes parked normally in the car-park. Love affairs started, flourished, turned into disappointment or jealousy and ended in that pub. It’s possible that whole lives started there too, but that was nothing to do with me even if I did know exactly who was involved in that particular episode.

The Red Lion shut over a decade ago. There’s another pub called the Red Lion just over a mile away but it’s not the same. It never was. It just wasn’t the one you went to. Was it so good because of the place, or the people who went there? It’s something I’m asking myself more and more these days. And more and more I’m thinking the land of lost content is a place in your heart, not anywhere you can find on a map.

Along With Anne of Green Gables

I never read Anne of Green Gables. I remember seeing it on TV but about the only salient details that stand out now, rooting through the dusty attic of memories of black and white children’s entertainment seem to be old-fashioned clothes, shrubbery and the words “Ant Murilla” repeated about 500 times per episode. Why I’m wondering about this at all is because my dedicated manuscript editor emailed me to say she’d just had email from Amazon.com.

Nothing unusual there. What was, was the suggestion from Amazon that Not Your Heart Away is in their opinion, “similar.” Not ‘if you like this book you might like these,” but outright ‘similar books.’ So I thought I’d better have a look and see what Anne of Green Gables was all about. I had a quick look on Wikipedia to see what happened to Anne. She was orphaned, spent much of her childhood in orphanages and then gets sent to rural Prince Edward Island after quite-old-in-those-days Mathew Cuthbert and Ant Murilla (sorry, I just can’t get that BBC Drama department Canadian accent out of my head) apply to adopt a boy orphan to help run their farm and get sent Anne instead. I’m not seeing it yet, frankly.

Anne is described as bright and quick, eager to please, talkative, and extremely imaginative. She has a pale face and freckles and red hair.

Not Liz with brown hair and not Claire with dark hair then. And neither of those two could be described as eager to please, or certainly not eager to please Ben, anyway.

As a child of imagination, Anne takes much joy in life and adapts quickly, thriving in the close-knit farming village. Her talkativeness initially drives the prim, duty-driven Marilla to distraction, although Matthew falls for her charm immediately. Anne says that they are ‘kindred spirits’.

True, Ben falls for Claire’s charms pretty much immediately, but then, it doesn’t take much to get his attention in that respect. Ask Poppy.

Not Your Green Gables

The book recounts Anne’s adventures in making a home: the country school where she quickly excels in her studies; her friendship with Diana Barry (her best or “bosom friend” as Anne fondly calls her); her budding literary ambitions; and her rivalry with a classmate who teases her about her red hair. For that he earns her instant hatred, although he apologizes many times. As time passes, Anne realizes she no longer hates Gilbert but cannot bring herself to admit it. However, by the end of the book they become friends.

Not Your Heart Away is set in the countryside, admittedly, but there is a distinct lack of attention to school-work. Rejection, friendship and love, yes. It’s got that in common. Liz and Ben, well that’s another story, a much deeper one than the one he wanted to share about Claire. Whether those two were ever really friends is debatable. Bosoms feature quite prominently in Ben’s worldview, too.

The book also follows Anne’s adventures in quiet, old-fashioned Avonlea. Episodes include accidentally getting someone drunk.

I’m starting to see similarities here, although there is nothing accidental about any of the characters getting drunk. I suspect Poppy and Claire at least were quite a bit more drunk than Anne of Green Gables got, at least at that age. I certainly hope so, anyway.

At sixteen, Anne goes to Queen’s Academy to earn a teaching license. She obtains her license in one year instead of the usual two and wins the Avery Scholarship for the top student in English. Her attainment of this scholarship would allow her to pursue a B.A. degree on the mainland in Nova Scotia.

Bizzarely, someone who partly inspired the character of Claire recently got her own teaching licence, according to Facebook. Whether or not she won the Top Student award I’m uncertain about.

Near the end of the book, Matthew dies after learning that all of his and Marilla’s money has been lost. Out of devotion to Marilla and Green Gables, Anne gives up the Avery Scholarship to stay at home and help Marilla, whose eyesight is diminishing. She plans to teach and return to Green Gables on weekends.

I’m not spoiling the plot by saying nobody dies of a heart attack in Not Your Heart Away, although the play on the title might have been fun to do. Next time, maybe. Nobody starts going blind, although Liz would certainly argue Ben might as well be when it comes to anything Claire ever does. Deaf, too. Lots of money is lost though, and without a homesteading land grant available for over a thousand years in Wiltshire, Claire’s family have to make some tough decisions about where they are going to live. Her parents seem to have got a little confused about who they were living with too, particularly at weekends.

In an act of friendship, Gilbert Blythe gives up his teaching position at the Avonlea School to work at White Sands School instead. Anne can teach in Avonlea and stay at Green Gables all through the week. After this kind act, Anne and Gilbert’s friendship is cemented, and Anne looks forward to the next “bend in the road.”

Most people who knew Ben were convinced that the next bend in the road would be the last one they ever saw if they were in the same car and he was driving. Nobody got taught anything, least of all Ben. Work was just a tiny cloud on the far horizon in the land of lost content that was the summer of Not Your Heart Away.

But Anne of Green Gables does have some similarities. It’s got if not haunted bedrooms and a girl haunted by her future, at least haunted woods. It’s set in the middle of a rural nowhere, but with the same juxtaposition of the big world outside and the twining beauty of the trees and fields all around. Anne’s house is based on a very real house too, one that is now a tourist attraction rather than a spa for Olympic athletes, which is what happened to Claire’s house.

So, distinctly hmmmm, Amazon. I just hope Not Your Heart Away gets translated into 36 languages and made into three films and a TV series as well. It’s just that if it’s going to be on at tea-time I think the drinking, spliffing, attempted drink-driving and consensual clothes adjusting in parks is going to have to go.

Stranger than fiction

Stranger than comedy, anyway.

I was sitting in a pub at the end of last year talking with a man known in the foodie community as The Sausage King, but not a name I felt I could ask for him by in The Crown.

You know something about food, he said. How about doing something on my radio show?

I was trying to distance myself from food a bit which some recent photos show might be a good idea. So I suggested I did something else.

What?

I don’t know. Er, how about a celebrity chef gets kidnapped by a bankrupt battery chicken farmer and made to recant publicly after he’s campaigned for free-range hens? I’ll call it No Batteries Required.

Ok, do it, he said. Darn.

After stopping and starting a bit I did it. Predictably the chicken farmer gets arrested so I had a defence solicitor and a police sergeant review it to make sure at least the procedures were believable. I just had email from one of them today. “How did you know about the whatever? You’re not supposed to know that.”

Without spoiling the story, the whatever was put in because it was the most ridiculous thing I could think of in the circumstances. I didn’t know about it. It’s almost as ludicrous as the chicken tattoo. But I so hope the Prime Minister really does have that tattooed on him where people can’t see it.

Low Tone

Back in 1995 I got a saxophone for Christmas. I thought it was a shotgun.

It was an easy mistake to make, the kind that could happen to anyone. We’d gone down to a flat we’d got hold of in Lyme Regis and while it was all French Lieutenant’s Woman it was freezing and bleak and apart from walking there wasn’t a huge amount to do. When I brought the bags in from the car I thought the heavy square box was a cased 12-bore, which was unexpected but then, so was a saxophone.

I’d wanted to play one for years but got slightly beyond the age when you can tap on garage doors and ask the teenagers practising if you can jam with them. No thanks to Jimmy Saville, but as Louis Jordan used to sing, you cain’t get that no more.

I was about thirteen when I bought my first LP, the original RCA Victor Glenn Miller recordings from 1943/44. Nobody liked that, then. Older people who knew it from the first time around didn’t seem to listen to it, but maybe they’d heard about enough of it already. I still can’t see how that’s possible. People my age weren’t into it then. It’s nice to know that one or two are now. It wasn’t just me.

I don’t know what it is about that sound. It wasn’t so much Tex Beneke who arguably had as much to with establisahing how the band sounded as Glenn Miller did himself or Charlie Parker or even, as we learned, them Duke boys’s big city uncle, Bill Clinton. It was all of it, the wrap-around warmth of the sound. That would have been something I could have done with, back then. It was reassuring, somehow, the reassurance helped by the distance between then and now, because you can’t hear that Big Band sound in England, something like Moonlight Serenade without realising why all those Americans were here, bringing the tunes with them. Close your eyes to that music and you can still see the Fortresses and Liberators slowly waltzing through the sky, the quick step as the bomb loads drop away, the dainty pirouettes of the fighters boring through the formation, the innocent wisp of smoke from first an engine, then a fuselage and then the pyre of twelve men dropping through five miles of sky. It was an odd childhood. We were haunted by the War. Nobody talked about it. It was so big nobody had to. My school was full of kids with names from two thousand miles away whose parents hardly ever spoke about how they got there. Every toy-shop window had the plastic 1:72 scale Airfix memorials to the jeeps and tanks and planes and boats lots of our fathers knew much too well back when they were just ten years older than we were, looking through the glass from the street.

Learn to play the saxophone

But it was still good music. It was what I wanted to play. And later, when I heard it, I wanted to play Louis Jordan and the Motels and Dexy’s Midnight Runners and of course, of course Kid Creole and the Coconuts and Springsteen and Steely Dan and Cole Porter. I liked that honeyed sound. I liked the seduction of it all. Who wouldn’t? When I was on summer camp one year in Wisconsin I used to take a friend’s uncle’s sax out into the woods and learn how to make sounds with it and by the end of camp I could run through some of the easier Glenn Miller tunes from the memorial library in my head as well as have a stab at the solo in the Motel’s Total Control. There was someone I really, really wanted to play that to. One day, maybe.

Learning to read music would have helped and it still would, but until then I just have to play just what I feel, in the absence of a more formal, structured approach. I know I should. I will. But I’ve got stuff to do first. You know how it is. I’ve got to listen to Deacon Blue – no, the real one, the one Deacon Blue got their name from – a lot before I go back to Every Good Boy Deserves Favour on the stave. That’s the song I want at my funeral. How cool would that be?

The Spring I got my sax I had four top front crowns done. I spent nearly two hours getting my teeth ground off. The dentist told me it wouldn’t hurt and he was right, but he warned me it would probably do stuff to my head, stuff you couldn’t see. He was right about that too. He’d told me to bring a CD in. He forgot to say bring a CD that is going to take your attention for a long time but one you don’t mind never listening to again. It was Mozart. I haven’t been able to listen to it ever since. After that I was more than a little wary of biting hard on anything for months, even though my brand new Terminator-style replicant teeth would have happily bitten straight through the mouthpiece and looked darned good while they did it. Even so, I didn’t want to play sax for a long time.

Once I’d had a dream of living in Camden and playing in pub bands. That was a dream that might have happened if I’d (a) had a saxophone then and more importantly (b) done anything at all about it. Just recently someone was getting a band together, a reunion of a band they’d had at university. I said I’d play. I’d never, ever played in public before and up to the night before I was still wondering if anyone I was with would ever talk to me again if I said I wasn’t going to do it. But I did it, thanks to some wonderful support. It taught me something I wish I’d learned a long, long time ago, even if I do still remember how that music used to make me smile. Friends don’t care if you mess up. They care a lot more if you don’t do what you can.

When I got back home after that weekend I’ve tried to get an hour a day practising, accompanying those old tunes, the really old ones and the ones that when I first heard them weren’t old at all. I looked up my Martin Handcraft on the web, using the matching serial numbers to find out when it was made. This particular Low Tone, so old they didn’t call them tenor saxes in those days, was made in the summer of 1924. I’ve cleaned it as well as practiced more with it. I’m going to get a decent brass mouthpiece because I think it deserves something a little better than the £9.99 piece of plastic I’ve been using and losing control of the reed on, after about half an hour. Odd to think of it being that old though. That same sax, all the way from Indiana, was around before every one of the musicians I’ve been talking about here. Any one of them could have played it. I don’t know how, or when it got to England. But I can make a story about it.