The Stalker

I’m being stalked.

It all started back in September. Yawning early one Saturday morning I stagger out of the house off to buy a newspaper. As usual my shoes are undone, I’ve just pulled on yesterdays clothes and in many ways I feel still undressed. Ninety-eight strides later I enter the newsagents with the tinkle of the bell above the door and I nod a cheery good morning to the owner. I hadn’t noticed the stalker yet, but he wasn’t far away.

It was walking back, leafing through the Guardian’s supplements that I first spotted him. At around the forty-second step I saw him staring back out of the cover to the magazine. Dressed in a blue-ish t-shirt, his eyes have a faraway dreamy look and he seems uncomfortable in a room that appears to be a recording studio. He almost seems to be trying to look over his shoulder at something disturbing going on out of the photograph. He is Simon Armitage, the Poet.

I don’t know why I’ve attached his profession like a grand title to him: Simon Armitage, the Poet. I can’t think of another Simon Armitage that it’s necessary to distinguish him from. I think it might be something I’ve sub-consciously picked up from Beck who frequently refers to people whom she’s worked with by their profession. John the Playwright, Tom the Actor, Andy the Jazz Pianist, Heather the Tap Dancer. Curiously I never hear of Chet the Milkman anymore.

Anyway, back to the plot. Simon Armitage is writing in the Guardian about defying middle age and going back to his teenage dreams of being a rock-star. He and a friend get together, write some songs, Simon’s appropriately enough responsible for the lyrics, they record a EP. I don’t actually get around to reading it until Tuesday on a bus steamed up from warm breath against torrential rain battered glass. Despite having to cut out the background cackle of teenage girls I find it an extremely witty and interesting article. I enjoy greatly, but here’s the thing - Poetry isn’t really my bag so I didn’t have a clue who Simon Armitage was. The name, however, tugged at my brain.

A couple of days later I’m sitting at my computer looking at blank screen when I start to lazily look around the room. Above the computer there’s poster of the Manhattan skyline on the wall with the Brooklyn bridge in the distance murky in the heat haze. I love this poster. It’s enables me to pretend that I have a spectacular view to take inspiration from rather than the off-white plaster, or if I move to Beck’s desk then the irregular pattern of tumble down fences, overgrown gardens with varying amounts of dumped bedroom furniture and the occasional ginger cat. Next to this, attached with a scrap of blue tack, is a copy of my course reading list. I’ve coded each of the books by type. F for fiction, L for life writing, P for poetry and R for literary theory works. There’s also various ticks or notes to myself, such as to collect my Henry James anthology from my parents’ house. I suddenly notice that there’s one book I don’t seem to have categorised. It is the The Penguin Book Of Poetry From Britain Since 1945. Presumably the title was too self-explanatory to warrant my effort in placing a capital P inside a circle next to it, but I realise that it’s co-edited by Robert Crawford and Simon Armitage.

Odd coincidence.

Later that same week I start the ignition in the car and the radio automatically blares into life. It’s pre-tuned to Radio 4, but I fancy listening to some music so I instantly press the seek button. Just before the tuner veers off into the ether of the FM waveband I catch the name Simon Armitage from the presenter. By the time I’ve re-tuned the radio they’ve moved on to something else and I never do find out either the context they were speaking in or even if I heard correctly. For the rest of the journey down to Staples in Peckham to buy some printing paper it’s as though there’s someone else in the car with me.

In October one of the seminars for my course is held in the Poetry Library within the South Bank Centre. I suspect that we’re extradited from darkest South-East London because it suits the schedule of the guest speaker, who happens to be a poet, but it also allows us to have a look around the library. It’s a pretty good resource, if you’re into poetry. They hold at least one copy of every poem published in England and the majority of those published in the English Language. We listen to a fairly standard induction talk about the history of the collection and are then invited to have a wander round. As I said, I don’t really “do” poetry so I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular. I seemed to amble aimlessly into the shelves holding the limited edition magazines. I ran my fingers along the cool metal shelves before, without even looking, pulling out one at random. The cover boasts a list of contributors and right at the top: Simon Armitage. I’m beginning to get a little disturbed by this and I hold the magazine at arm’s length, almost afraid of it. Before I can decide whether to open the cover or run away squealing one of my classmates calls down that everyone’s starting to head into the lecture hall. The magazines are reference only so I place it back on the shelf.

We listen to the poet talk. She’s good. I enjoy it, even though it’s insanely hot and I start to feel slightly woozy. At the end she hands out some photocopied pieces - example of poetry, writings about poetry. I flick through them on the train on the way home. They include Simon Armitage’s Top Tips For Poetry Readers. I stuff it back into my bag unread and drum by fingers against the window as it begins to drizzle.

Two weeks ago I have a meeting with my external tutor, a London based writer who, essentially, reads our stuff and then tells us what he thinks of it. He recommends some books for me to read and straight after the meeting I dutifully trot over the library. I collect the works I’m interested in and check my watch. It’s just before four. At six-thirty I’m planning on attending a seminar on the Shakespeare-Marlowe question - namely, did Christopher Marlowe fake his own death, flee to Northern Italy and write the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare? This isn’t a part of my course, but it’s something I’ve been reading about for years and as I’m technically part of the English department I’m going to listen in. I decide that I can’t be bothered to go home and that I’ll just read in the library.

It’s pretty busy for a Wednesday afternoon and there are only a couple of free tables. I take one by the window overlooking the congested A2. There are two books already there. One of them is Simon Armitage’s Xanadu. I get up and walk away, the hairs on the back of my neck tingle and I start to glance over my shoulder fully expecting the book to be collected up by the poet himself.

A few days later I’m browsing the book shelves at home. I’m looking for Paul Auster’s True Tales Of American Life (this later turns out to be helpfully filed under the bed) when my attention is drawn to a shockingly pink book spine. Yep: Simon Armitage’s Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid. I slide the slim hardback out of it’s slot. It feels weird in my hands, almost electric. I don’t remember having ever seen it before. I’m a little concerned as to how it arrived here without so much as a crinkle to the cover.

The beginnings of my love affairs with various authors have not always been conventional. When I was at University a neighbour of my parents lent them a copy of Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. For some reason it sat in my room for almost a year and a half. I kept intending to take it to Sheffield with me, but always forgot. When I finally began reading, it was difficult to put it down until I’d turned the last page and even then I wanted to go back to the beginning and start again. When I eventually “remembered” to take it back home the neighbours had moved. When I was seventeen I brought a copy of Graham Swift’s Last Orders primarily because it had a picture of a pint of beer on the front. Around the same time I was mesmerised by the first few pages I of Seamus Deane’s Reading In The Dark which I read in the Solihull branch of Waterstones without any money to pay for it. When I returned a few weeks later, cash in hand, I had forgotten both the book’s title and it’s author. All I could recall was the striking image on the front of a battered black and white photograph showing two young boys and the bright yellow-orange strap across the top. Beck and I proceeded to take virtually every single book off the shelves until we found it.
Weirdness can be a good omen.

Resigned to the seemingly inevitable I sat down in the large, dusty leather chair that we’d liberated when Beck’s friend Jo (Jo the What? I can’t remember.) was going to chuck it in a skip. I open the covers and inhale that new, untouched book smell.

I begin to read.

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You can find out more about Simon Armitage here:

http://www.simonarmitage.com/

You can read the entire Guardian article that triggered this odd little episode here:

http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/story/0,,2178386,00.html

You can buy Simon Armitage’s poems and prose (and you should consider it, they’re good) here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h_/203-3445518-8683126?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=simon+armitage