David Marston Writes

If not exactly goodbye then something sort of like it.

2012-02-04T15:41:00.003Z

Back in November I was in the Camden Roundhouse watching The Low Anthem play a gig. My leather jacket was on the floor, between my feet, its pockets stretched with various books and accessories. The Low Anthem played their succulent music, like something which drifted out of the still heart of the tornado in the dust bowl, and beer dripped off my fingers onto my jacket below. I didn’t care. It could take it. The band encouraged us to take out our mobile phones and ring the person next to us, connect the lines and then let the static fill the air like drowning butterflies. It was surprisingly heartbreaking: the packed room flooded with the light of a thousand screens and a disjointed warbling which rebounded in from outer space.

By January I am sitting in the kitchen writing at the desk in the corner using a borrowed laptop. The security light, newly installed after the burglary, in the couch of the L between the kitchen and the bedroom isn’t working properly. The sensor reacts to a falling leaf or a farting ant and the patio is engulfed in an explosion of flood lighting. Whoompf, just like a stadium being used for a Reebok advert.

It’s distracting.

I glance, again, to the window and the neon roars across the bushes making them look super-real, like something back-dropped in a film. In the foreground my leather jacket is folded haphazardly across the back of one of the chairs.

It needs to be buried.

It needs the last rites.

I don’t know about you but I have an avatar in my head; a representation of myself which is my own mental shorthand for, well, for me. My thought patterns super-impose this version of myself into the situations covered by my internal monologue, whether the narrative reflects what is actually happening outside my head or is just a random collection of fantasised thoughts, the maybe and the what ifs, it’s never actually me, just a representation. Do you do this, or am I just crazy?

When I was younger, it was a cartoon drawing: Black doc martin boots, black jeans, black t-shirt, that old grey trenchcoat I used to wear pretending I was a goth John Constantine, long hair, darker than it really is, draped forward across my face, big dark glasses. Pillock. But for a fourteen year old moment it felt cool and that was kind of how I stayed in my head for too long.

At some point, I don’t know when, I, the artificial me, changed. I became less cartoon, less animate, more like a photo dropped in for the moment, briefly filling a space where David should exist. Because this is a photo, it is not a full body image. Instead, I am sitting, turning my neck to look to the camera. I think there is a pint, or maybe a whisky in my hand. Occasionally this disappears. It is sunny in the background. My mouth is open in a half-laugh-smile. I wear, I think, a grey shirt with the top couple of buttons undone and an old black leather jacket.
It is part of me, but now it is dead.

It has, depending on who you ask, been dead for some time, but recently I finally conceded that it was better to put it out its misery. Ratted with holes and faded scuffs, refusing to dry properly when rained heavily upon it is in a similar state to the sheep from which it borrow its skin. And yet it still smells of my life. It still feels alive as I conduct an autopsy and empty the pockets of ticket stubs and pens and scraps of paper with notes and bar names scrawled across, an old book mark, a lighter: all the things of life.

But that’s okay. In December I found a new leather jacket, by which I mean not that I found one in the street, but that I bought one. From a market stall. It’s brown and a different cut, longer and it’s more shiny and stiffer, although that will fade with time. I like it, but I still need the old one. It is hard to say goodbye.
Girls have, in equal measure, either loved or hated that jacket, and even those who ended up hating it, mostly, saw its charm for a little while. For the coat is me. It is infused with my character and growth from the long decade of just twenty to thirty-two and a half. So many drinks, late night buses to who knows where, dropped down the back of pub chairs, the floors of gigs, used as a pillow in someone’s bathtub. At least once I woke up in my old flat, went to buy my paper and in the Saturday drizzle wondered why I wasn’t wearing my coat, became convinced I’d left it in a pub round the back of Wardour Street and eventually found it hanging off the showerhead. It’s a mischievous little beast which likes to get around and into scrapes with little regard for sleep or responsibility. Wearing that coat I am rarely tired; it’s like a jolt of amphetamines direct into my spine. It makes me me.

But as I’ve previously discussed, it is perhaps time to grow up and move into a new decade, a shorter one no doubt, post youth and pre middle age; young manhood, perhaps, or actually as I type this on a Friday night having cried off post-work drinks or a birthday party for a friend of my girlfriend’s because I am crankily tired and have instead gone home to rewrites parts of lost novels, hit the security light with a broom until it fucks off and dies and do my shitting ironing, any pretence at youth is a fallacy that should be shunned.

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe, he says admiring himself in the mirror, there is one more leather jacket in me before I look like too old to be trying so hard.

Still, the old faithful, shep, my drinking buddy, my saviour, deserves something more, a retirement home of sorts. I could put in on ebay, I think, or gumtree but closer inspection of the holes shows the stuffing rapidly escaping and I just can’t imagine anyone paying money for it. I could give it away on freecycle. I look again at its strange shapeness, the warped form from stuffing an 800 page paperback novel in the inside pocket, two cans of ale and an a-z in the hip pockets. It looks like a tiger has played with it for too long. Ah, I could just abandon it at a bus stop, somewhere random, near the sort of quality pub from which people catch the bus at times when a coat might come in useful. One last glorious run, a lap of honour around the London ale-lines and after that, who knows, a happy life frolicking on a farm somewhere.

Poompf, the security light illuminates the back of the house again, shrouding me in a golden glow and bringing me back into the present, out of my cipher filled monologue imagination.

‘Isn’t that just kind of littering?’ asks my girlfriend, getting, as usual, the best lines.

She’s got a point. Into the rubbish it goes.

But not just yet. Soon. Soon. Just another couple of weeks, who knows when it might be needed again?

Write About

2012-01-21T12:51:00.002Z

I meant to write this over a month ago. Maybe it would have had more bite, more relevance had I written it immediately after the fact. Maybe, but it also would have been different. I would have written it, but typing made my fingers bleed.

At a conference I was organising, whilst opening a box of delegate packs at seven o’clock in the morning, I shredded the tips of my fingers open on the plastic coated card. I spent an hour walking around holding my right hand with the fingers in the air as thick red droplets ran down over my nails and into the pool of my palm.
Afterwards typing split the still fresh scars open; writing, literally, made me bleed.

I wanted to use the blog to voice some frustration, to vent some anger. After the events at the end of the God Reflex, my brief moment of tantrum thrown back in the face of exhaustion, I felt like I’d won. In the end, I overcome and popped out the other end if not quite shiny and new then at least not broken and beaten.

So, Friday evening, I went for a couple of beers. But, tired as I was, it wasn’t long before my heavy eyelids demanded to be closed. I made my excuses and headed for the train station. At Charing Cross, perhaps through mild tipsyness, perhaps through bleary vision, I managed to board a fast train to Sevenoaks by mistake.

Thirty minutes later and the next train back into town was yet another thirty minutes. I kicked my heels on the platform and wrapped myself deep in my greatcoat against the icy wind that cut across the top of the Kentish hillocks. All the time a growing tiredness and need to be at home exhibited itself through grumbling aloud to myself and incessant pacing back and forth punctuated by loud exhalations of air as the minutes refused to speed up. My girlfriend was out for dinner with some friends, so I just wanted to grab some food, have another beer and watch the tv, a rare lazy indulgence. Not too much to ask, surely?

Eventually, over two hours after I’d left Bloomsbury, I made my way down the Lewisham Way towards home. I felt out of sorts. Something felt wrong, a nagging at my guts like I should have known better.

I unlocked the door, not before dropping my keys and faffing around in the dark. Opposite the door from the communal hall is our bedroom. We always leave the door open, but there it was: closed. I thought ‘that’s odd, maybe she’s come home and gone to bed already.’

Gingerly I pushed the door. ‘Hun?’ I said conscious of a chill in the air and scattered shadows in the murk. Snapping on the light I saw the French windows were ajar and every drawer and cupboard thrown open. The bolts and locks in the windows had been forced through the frame, splintering the wood like a wound in the building’s fabric, like my fingers would be three days later. The bottom fell out of my stomach, a surging vacuum ripped everything downwards and a rush of nausea replaced it.

I ran to the kitchen where my laptop should have been. It wasn’t.

‘Fuck, no!’ I shouted, a real deafening bellow that echoed through the empty flat.

I rang the police and then began to try and gauge what else was gone. Her laptop too. Surely her jewelry, although I couldn’t be sure what there was. On the floor were some ipod headphones still curled neatly in a spool but no ipod. Cameras. Other things I wouldn’t notice for days. Then came a second bungee plummet for my stomach, a headlong dive into the ravine with air pressing against your eyeballs and then the snapping jerk backwards and the spine cracking flick through the air: my back-up hard-drive.

‘No!’ I properly screamed that time, unable to control my rage. The new neighbour who’d just moved in upstairs must have wondered who was killing whom.

The police came. My girlfriend’s phone ran out of battery before I could reach her. I paced the flat nervously, back and forth unsure what to do with myself; incapable of even sitting down, not knowing what I could possibly say when she came home.

At last, a key turned in the front door and I went to meet her in the darkened corrider.

I was somewhat depressed for days afterwards. The combination of the violation, my natural tendency towards melancholy, all those photo memories disappeared, all that work. The hours and hours and sacrifices and wrenching stuff from deep inside, all gone, all for nothing. All a waste. Me, a waste.

Writing had made me bleed in more than one way.

That fury was what I wanted to spleen if I’d had a computer, if my fingers hadn’t cracked open every time they stuck a keyboard at work.

Then, on the journey away for Christmas, away from the damage, away to forget in the car they inexplicably didn’t take, Belle and Sebastian sang on the stereo.

“I know a spell
That would make you help
Write about love, it could be in any tense
But it must make sense”

I looked across at her, dozing in the half-lit passenger seat. Ahead the black road was punctuated by neon lights dancing away over the rolling hillsides. I smiled both to myself and to her. Beloved. That was what I would do, not write about hate and anger and frustration and despair, but write about love. After all, what else is there of any worth? Write about love and love by writing.

The God Reflex - Spirit

2011-12-14T21:26:00.002Z

And in the end, well everything will just end. The beauty of creation, the void filling light will be snuffed out by a war which wrenches the world asunder. The many headed beasts will rise out of steaming hot oceans, the lamb’s blood will be spilt for no reason and the four cantering horsemen scattering pestilence, famine, brutality and the final, final death for all humanity will appear on the blood red horizon at the end of the anti-Christ’s reign. The good work, everything we’ve ached for will collapse into an abyss where the very fabric of reality cracks open and, maybe, the good will be reborn, to try again. To try better, to fail better.

‘I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the world,’ is a bit of dramatic flag waving to for tension’s sake from Flash Gordon, but, somehow, the impending end always feels plausible. Indeed the apocalypse fills fictions to overflow, words and images slip over the top of the page, the screen, and into a sticky puddle in our lap. As Stan Lee would have said, ‘this one’s got it all true believer’: The eternal battle for all humanity! Goodness versus the devil! Satan and the endless hordes of the flies rampaging up a local high street accosting boy scouts and traffic wardens alike. It’s particularly prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. For genres which seem intent on distancing themselves from the routine rules of the world they’re also the keenest for God and his adversary to crop up in some badly disguised form or other. All those stories I absorbed as a child of heroes and villains, and the fight over evil - nothing sums them up like the end of existence hanging in the balance, from the first Star Trek to Galactus looming, hungrily over the ozone layer. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is essentially revelations boiled down into an allegory about small boys trapped on an island. The underlying unnervingness of this is what makes it work for some many, for so long. Even CS Lewis in his Narnia books, despite the overt Christian tub-thumping, understood that the apocalypse is the end we fear the most because we don’t truly believe in it.

Perhaps this was partly why I studied history, by which I don’t mean the social details of a fifteenth century French Nun’s daily habits, but the grand, sweeping narrative arcs. Whilst all those nuanced details of mundane existence flesh out the past and give it life again, it was the politics, the wars, the murders and the power which really fascinated me, all those years ago. At the centre of it all, at least for medieval Europe, was the Catholic Church and its all threatening dogma: ‘be good, else come the last battle you’ll finish in the fiery pits for eternity’s duration.’ Hell was only ever a heartbeat away.

Numerous princes and irritants, dissidents and doubters were labelled the anti-Christ whose coming heralded the beginning of a thousand year reign by Beelzebub over the Earth. It’s only after the Devil’s millennia that things will really go tits up. My favourite candidate for the anti-Christ is Frederick Barbarossa, an early thirteenth century Holy Roman Emperor who dared to challenge the might of Rome in a fit of todger waggling and for ever more, according to legend, sleeps in a cave somewhere in Sicily, his broken body healing, his defiant soul surviving, awaiting the time become the harbinger of the end once again.

‘Look after yourself,’ my Mother said, some time ago as I was leaving to return to the big smoke. ‘You’re not indestructible.’

‘Yes, I am,’ I replied clambering into my car. ‘Well,’ I grinned cockily, ‘I bounce at any rate.’

But things catch up with you and sometimes you don’t quite bounce high enough. Sometimes you just pitter out.

Last week I had something of a meltdown. I’d been working hard, pushing myself both at work and with my writing, but predominately at work. Twelve hour days have been frustratingly familiar and then I write in the evenings and I neglect my life and still I don’t seem to get any closer. The point is always inching further away and so I am sacrificing things and what for? For nothing. For nothing but something half-forgotten, an argument to which no-one else is listening anymore.

I was, at my desk in central London, four and a half hours sleep for the second night running and getting eight-six emails in less than an hour, both my desk phone and my mobile ringing and a stinging, streaking white hot pain starts to pulse along my arm. I persevere, but a problem arises and I can’t think how to rectify it.
It’s a problem of my own making, something that’s happened because I didn’t have time to do it properly because I’ve got too much work to do and, for a moment, I just don’t know what to do. It feels as though my head is going to burst; literally it feels as though the skin at my temples is going to split and a throb that reverberates around my rib cage seems to contract.

I’d been to the doctors a couple of days before, not because I am ill, but because my girlfriend, rightly, thinks it’s probably not a bad idea to be registered with a GP. So I got an early registration appointment with the nurse a little after seven and as I waited, I worried about what I should be doing at work. During my check up I seemed fine until she took my blood pressure which was high. She took it again and tutted. She told me to unstress msyself and come back in three months.

‘Am I having a heart attack,’ I momentarily wonder as though that’s going to add to my problems and then I manage to calm down and realise that it’s a mild panic coupled with some fucking painful repetitive strain injury.

Bounce, bounce, bou-.

At home, that evening, I feel weighed down, as though my heart is pumping iron fillings through my blood stream. My girlfriend is endearingly sympathetic, yet I worry that such self-induced collapse can only be tolerated for a short while before it simply becomes a character failing. A spirit that refuses to relent only goes so far before it becomes frustratingly stubborn.

A bit like David Cameron being suicidally stubborn over Europe. Still, at least Nick Cleggs found some spirit again and spoken up. Admittedly it some old spirit, dried and crusty on a used tissue, but at least he’s speaking up again, trying to be heard over the distressed nation. Maybe he’s the one the anti-capitalist protestors should be looking to? Probably not, but they do need someone. Or perhaps just themselves.

The holy spirit, the holy ghost, is the third and final part of triune which makes up the Christian God almighty. Without the spirit there is no god, just mysterious paintings of an old man amongst clouds and legends of a bastard crucified. And yet this part is the hardest to define, the trickiest to understand. It is both the element which brought life into Mary’s womb and an ethereal notion of truth. It has both practical function and also is abstract to the point of incomprehension. It is but the word and the word is God and the words are what bring about our God reflex.
It’s always the words which haunt, which linger, which inspire, which hate, which love, which fight. Peel back the layers of everything and without language, there is nothing.

What is spirit? We talk about people having a lot of spirit, so it is the woman I saw sprawled on a zebra crossing at seven-thirty Tuesday evening, her skirt risen up the rim of her waist length fake fur jacket, big-arsed tiger print knickers gleefully displayed, quietly singing muddled songs from the Sound of Music to herself? No, that’s just drunkenness. High spirits is nothing but an excuse. Real spirit is something else.

Perhaps it’s the stoic, acceptance of life during wartime that many of our grandfathers would have had. They went off to fight and some came back, but many didn’t. Many may have been shocked into horror and lost, but many just got on with life. As though it was something you had to do. Me? I just go to work and I can’t really handle that. I guess it’s something that’s been lost over the generations, slowing being ebbed away at as life becomes more comfortable and your fucking iphone having insufficient signal to stream video is an infringement on your basic human rights.

Evelyn Waugh wrote a lot about spirit, I think, both holy and otherwise. He wrote some deft, slightly bitter comic turns too, but Brideshead Revisited – which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – is about man’s spirit and its fruitless defiance in the face of the holy spirit. Waugh was a convert as a man and he wanted to expose clever, cynically, envious, glutinous Charles Ryder to the innocence and loving malevolence of faith.

I’d forgotten what a wonderful novel it was, words to bring meaning to life more than abstract aspirations to saintliness, but the real world cast on paper. It had been years since I read it, but Brideshead just seemed to swell up from the deepest recesses of my brain and as some point over the summer my own work swerved away from being a relatively straightforward noir-esque murder mystery and something which wrapped in all those eternal themes that Waugh encircled in a single family. I’m not writing about Christianity, but I think I am writing about ideals and about heroes. Not fictional ones, not anymore, but about those people whom we let control our lives, who dominate us, and for whom our flesh is weak even if our spirit is strong.

I think I’ve been trying to expose the shallow adoration for others that we all instinctively have. Rather than be reliant on someone else, someone wonderfully marvellous who will be just as fallible when the mask slips, perhaps we just have faith in ourselves. I think we expect too much, we believe in the impossibility of others and so when we can’t reach their fake standards we are disappointed. Remember everyone is a fiction to some degree.

I don’t know what Samuel Beckett though of God, other than his comment about his most famous play: ‘I wrote Godot. If I’d meant God, I would have written God.’ One suspects that maybe he wouldn’t. Regardless of his religious views, he has another point to make: I found an old postcard the other day showing a man discovering that the heavy sack of grain over his shoulder has been leaking. ‘No matter,’ it says at the bottom, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

The God Reflex 2 - The Son

2011-12-07T00:19:00.001Z

Afterwards the light reached itself to every corner of the new found existence, stretching and yawning its way across the once invisible universe bringing the first vestiges of life with it. There was stillness, aside from the change from black to the unnamed not-black, and there was silence. Everything was still empty, but the emptiness has potential. A potential which, eventually, was filled with the movement and noises of shuffling, snorting creatures, the penultimate of which stumbled on two legs and was named Adam, forged in his creator’s image. The first son, the forgotten son, the less favoured child than his younger brother.

The God Reflex, if it even exists at all, means that in those moments of despair and panic, much how Adam would have felt awakening in the garden, we cease to be rational beings. Suddenly we, if only briefly, are prepared to believe in that which we’d previously dismissed. For an instant we have faith in the stories we learnt as a child. We believe in more than just the moral principles of religion, but in the mythos and magic that lie at its heart. Those stories that have been told and retold, shaped by events and agendas. And us. And then, like the moment before existence, like the silence before the Large Hadron Collider actually works, when all life pauses, ends and restarts, we return to our previous state. Just twenty-first century cynics again.

It’s not so unreasonable to believe in stories that are clearly impossible, is it? I used, once. When I was a child I believed in everything I read. In the past, before we came to the cusp of the future.

My belief, my faith, in the future changes almost day to day. Sometimes it’s easiest to just think that everything will work itself out. More frequently, the coming hardships, and therefore the need for some sort of life plan, seem unavoidable. New studies show that most people think they will be worse off than their parents; the unrelenting growth pattern where the next generation always enjoys more frivolous fun and a healthier lifestyle, appears to be ending. Strangling personal debt and unemployment beckons for the young; a housing market that climbs further away; longer working lives; worse pension benefits; soaring costs of basic commodities like fruit and vegetables, gas and electricity monopolised to maximise profits before the resources dry out; a swallowing, gaping refusal to accept that the planet is dying and every word I type, every song I listen to, every book I read all contributes to the capitalist, consumerism, selfish self-destruction of all life.

In such circumstances who would want the future, who would bring more living beings into the world?

And yet I can see the joy in the faces of my friends and family who have children, who have future. The pride and devotion they feel towards one whom came from them, but perhaps for the unconvinced, it is better to remain without? After all, provision for myself is likely to be difficult, why should I knowingly cause a dependant to suffer? To place the burden for my old age onto another who never asked for anything, who never existed until I chose to release myself into the gene pool?

My girlfriend and I went to see We Need to Talk About Kevin the other Sunday night. It’s a rare incident for me to see a movie without reading the book first - although, to be honest, I’ve no real inclination to read it. My girlfriend refers to this animosity towards best-sellers and popularism in general, as cultural snobbishness. Well, okay, so it sort of is, but I also feel that, since those books will be around to read in the future, and others might not be some sort of prioritisation is in order. Besides, somewhere along the line Lionel Shriver just started to irritate me. There was something strangely aggressive about her approach to marketing which I found disturbing.

Anyway, it was hardly relaxing end of the weekend viewing. Whilst it was indeed prettily directed and neatly acted I found the sense of foreboding doom difficult to ignore. It was like a relentless voice from above signposting the devil in all our spawn, a thundering arrow jutting down into the middle of the narrative declaring that was possible would be inevitable. It’s just what happened to people, okay?
The movie did, once we’d pulled apart the plot and style, force us into a vague conversation about children and the complexities of being a parent. My standpoint has always been unashamedly ambiguous sprinkled with cruel jokes about keeping infants in plastic boxes in the cellar, but this has only ever been a distraction technique. All the gags and socially unacceptable statements can’t hide my internal unease, my lack of a plan.

Maybe I’d have more decisive clarity if I had a life plan. Maybe, maybe not, but the world keeps getting in my way. Events, dear boy, events, conspire against me and I’m not single-minded enough to plough on regardless. Those that do have that drive also seem to have this faith that the world will always, stutteringly but ultimately actually, improve. That’s something which seems to be as flawed, or at least as unproven, as a faith in divinity. Huh, I make myself sound like life has been one long hardship, but then I look up from my keyboard as glance around my world. In the main it looks pretty damn good. Different from how I once expected, but very fine indeed.

Is there any point in having a plan when the pace of change over the past hundred years has left a world utterly unrecognisable from the one our great-grandparents were born into and who’s to say it’s going to slow down. Society and the ways in which we interact with reality have shifted into something inconceivable at the end of the First World War. But, whilst change still advances at a pace I find almost impossible to keep up with, the expected end point has shifted from a utopia to a dystopia in the same period of time which I spent at infant school. The lucky few, the so-called one percent, will continue their personal advancement whilst everyone else finds themselves relocated to down amongst the Morlocks in the sewers.

Perhaps this in itself helps to explain the God Reflex? That when the world’s demise appears inevitable in one form or another then at least there is another life to be embraced, an afterlife of perfection and enchantment, once you’ve negotiated the oft forgotten notion of purgatory. Everyone, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, passes through that temporal punishment, where the good and evil are purged from one another, torment tests the worthy for the advancement up the divine ascent to heaven whilst the others spiral down to the fiery pits. But for all of us there is the opportunity of perfection, something better than an ever degrading human existence, to be snatched.

Whatever his personal opinions on the church, Dante lived in fourteenth century Italy and so the concept of a better world in the next was pressingly desirable. Life would have been moderately short and filled with far more difficulties than running out of coffee or a jam on the motorway so what came next important. In the same way, a son was crucial to continue the lineage. They came next too, only on the Earthly plain. Legacy and the next life; the lines become blurred as the two interlock like reincarnation.

Perhaps that explains my reticence. I worry that I expect a son to be better than me. Not exactly a hard feat, but still an unnecessary burden. Is that what Jesus, Adam’s sort of younger brother, was supposed to be? Better than humanity’s creator, its saviour?

Whilst I am in no way trying to compare myself to anyone else’s deity or the so-called son of God (although I’m sure there are those out there who would expect me to do just that), I worry that I have been something of a disappointment, or at least a mystery, as a son. I lack a career; I lack offspring of my own; I am far away and unable to engage with family responsibilities fully; I feel as though I am yet to do anything of worth to justify this self-indulgence.

No, that is not fair. I know my family, my Father, love me and are proud of my meagre achievements. They don’t begrudge me my independence and nor do they expect me to feel guilty for it. Kevin is guiltless, that’s what seems so alien about the character. He’s so utterly free from remorse whilst his mother drowns in a sense of self-indulgent shame, a personal affront which implies immaturity below her years and experience.

I wandered through the protest camp outside St Paul’s the other evening, on the way home via London Bridge station after a few beers with Ben. It was eerily quiet and yet defiantly full of people sheltering inside their tents, deep breaths echoing out into the open night sky. The plastic pseudo canvas flickered in the reflected up lighting illuminating the domed tower high above them. As I walked, I remembered an anecdote I’d read recently. The main complaint about their protest against capitalism is that they don’t know what they want instead. If you go to a restaurant and your steak is disgusting you don’t have to eat it. You also don’t have know how to grill an amazing steak to know you want something different to what you had before, something better.

You don’t have to know exactly what you want in life, but it doesn’t hurt to always want something better and sometimes helps to acknowledge that you can be more than one thing. It is possible to be both the son and the father without losing traits of either.

Which makes me wonder whether you can also be the final component of the trinity?

The God Reflex - The Father

2011-11-30T07:44:00.002Z

There are moments of intense darkness in life, as though there is nothing else in the universe except the black. As though it hasn’t yet come to life. Endless. Unrelenting. Pitch, thick, black. And then, with a sound like a breath, there can be a chink, a glimmer of golden light which etches its way through.

Does this sound familiar?

I suspect that there comes a moment in most people’s lives, a point when they have pitched to their lowest, that they consider seeking salvation from something intangible. I’ve done it. Only briefly, but at those scarce times when all the other options were exhausted and there seemed to be nothing else to lose, no further down that I could possibly sink. Those moments when I found myself alone in the night with an incoherent mind and an ache of remorse ricocheting from my gut, through my chest and heart, resting heavily in my lungs before building pressure up through my throat causing swelling behind my eyes and finally forming a throb on my brain that contracts all the muscles in my body in shame; in wishing that I could say or do it all again just to make the weariness go away. Yes, I confess In those moments, I have rolled my eyes upwards and turned my thoughts, not entirely metaphorically, heavenwards.

‘Please God,’ I may have whispered and then, selfishly, asked for some favourable miracle. Or, at least, for it to all just to stop. Afterwards, I felt ashamed at my temptation; at my automatic God reflex.

And of course my plea never works which, when life inevitably sorts itself out, simply adds to my rationale for the emptiness of the universe, for the non-existence of any deity. That there is no divine judgement or purpose. Instead it’s all just the tidal ebbs and flows of petty coincidence. But, even if there were an all-mighty keeping an eye on us, I should realise that what I’ve asked, or begged, for simply isn’t how it works. Like all nice girls, God rarely puts out on the first date. There’s a getting to know each other phase, a confirmation that the other isn’t a psycho, a sense of some sort of commitment first.

A God reflex; when non-believers call on a higher power to sort out the impossible. Starting to sound familiar?

I know, work with and am friends with Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, followers of Shinto and all manner of religions, even the sort where people have half-defined it themselves. Alan Moore, not alas a personal friend but he seems to keep cropping up, belongs to the religion of Glycon, a ancient snake-god with a elegant seventies male flowing locks whom most researchers, including Moore, acknowledge was nothing more than a Roman joke . Moore’s “belief” is partially an intellectual experiment, similar to the man whom I’ve read about and can’t find the name of who decided to whole-heartedly follow a different religion for a brief period in order to find the one he liked, and partly mid-life crisis where he’s decided to become a magician. Magic, Moore says, and religion are intrinsically linked. They are both, after all, about words. Words which reveal something hitherto known but not fully understood. And the wholehearted, often unquestioning, belief in the tapestry stitched by those words as Truth.

Which is why there’s something unsettlingly sinister about Michael Gove – the Tory minister who looks as though he’d be most at home in an oversized black uniform overseeing a camp – sending copies of the anniversary edition of the King James bible, complete with Gove’s own introduction, to schools. The King James bible is an example of how crucially interlinked language and religion are. It not only cemented the understanding of Protestantism is early Stuart Britain but was almost singlehandedly responsible for the spread, growth and embedding of English as first a national and then an international language. Without it we’d still be swearing in French.

I can see where Moore’s coming from, but for me whilst belief can be influenced by words I think it is also grounded in something more abstract. It really requires a more underlying inclination to need, to want and to give yourself back to from whence you came. Without it you’re just the grumpy Brummie tuting in the back row of the magic show that the trick seems impossible.

Perhaps, though, it is this apparent relationship with words which makes the overtly religious writer writing religious characters something of a rarity. To an extent they can understand too well how the carefully phrased sentence can be used to convince. Graham Greene, originally nothing but a Russian Roulette enthusiast, suddenly became devoutly Catholic in his twenties. Quite a turn of character for such a womaniser, but then Greene always was a bundle of contradictions. He was a bitter cynic who was also deliriously romantic, a regular user of prostitutes who fell in love easily, and yet it was the hypocrisies which fuelled his writing demons. For Greene, religion was too important to ignore; it gave people, both those that walked around talking to others and interacting with the physical world as well as characters etched onto paper by the thudding imprint of the typewriter keys, a soul. He criticised Virginia Woolf and EM Forrester for, despite all their lyrical inventiveness, being concerned with nothing but cardboard cut outs of people whilst the eternal conflict of belief was what drove real people to struggle with the decisions of existence. Life, he appeared to be saying, was all about what happened once it was over.

That was something which worried me. I remember as an eight or nine year old being frightened of death. I was already fairly certain that I didn’t believe in a painted picture of heaven where winged angels plucked harps atop perfectly formed clouds, but alternative was made my head hurt. I was confused by an afterlife I’d imagined where there was nothing but disembodied voices in a grey smog like world, where you could talk and communicate but never touch or see, just the snatches of loved voices and strangers far away or so close you’d imagine them on where your neck had once been. It gave me goose-bumps. And yet the idea that there was simply nothing, that my consciousness froze and melted away to have never been was too big for my little head to contain.

I seem to be floundering on the edges of Christianity. Sorry. I can’t help it. Obviously religion and therefore God has a fairly wide definition, but for the purposes of “the God reflex”, I am, for simplicity, sticking with English Protestantism and some conflicting dollops of Catholicism lumped in. Why? Well, I think, despite diminishing returns in church aisles, Britain is still just about hanging on as a nominally “Christian” country. Whatever the hell that means since there isn’t, rightly, a state sanctioned religion and you cannot say one religion is fundamentally more British than another. Instead it’s just that white middle-class people from the middle-of-the-country, people like me and this is blog is always about me really, if they are anything are statistically more likely to be Christian.

Fuck, aren’t we all unoriginal? Here we are in 2011 and nothing’s changed in the last five hundred years. Christianity is looking a bit bedraggled and beaten, smelling like it hasn’t had a wash in a while, but still at the core. Which is why it’s no coincidence that the anti-capitalist protestors are encamped outside St Paul’s. The seat of the Protestant church’s government may officially be Canterbury, but St Paul’s is its figurehead, its grandest architectural statement. Okay, so there might be limited other places where you can throw up a thousand tents in the middle of the City of London without having a double-decker bus plough through your sleeping bag every half an hour, but I think it’s more serendipitous than pure convenience. I think it feels irrationally right, almost like faith might. Their presence forces the church to become involved in twenty-first century politics. Even though they’re spending most of their time trying to avoid saying something the flock is turning to them and begging for an alternative to the capitalist anti-God life we all freely adopted a while back when it suited us.

We need to be careful here. I mean it’s not like the church doesn’t have enough blood on its hand or, indeed, all the way to its red stained armpits. A thousand plus British years of internal crowd subjection, external moral expansion and enough butchery with convoluted excuses shoe-horned into a fluid dogma are hardly a glowing resume for a bright new world, but maybe, in the past forty years or so whilst it’s been beaten back by secularism, the church has had time to rethink.

Sorry. The purpose of this blog isn’t to join the God and faith bashing, the “aren’t people a bunch of fucking deluded schmucks brigade”, if only because marching at the head that particular army is Richard Dawkins, a man so utterly smugly odious that I am relieved to now find him inescapable from his comedy variant on Radio 4. The God Delusion is a different point. That’s about why people are hoodwinked into believing, how the church manipulates society and individuals out of the belief, money, time and occasionally morals. That’s fine. I get that. What I want to know is whether Dawkins, at moments when his family’s safety is threatened and there really is no way to avoid the plunging car off the ravine edge, closes his eyes and whispers to an entity he despises? Just in case?

Most people would. It’s not necessarily something to feel guilty about, but why do we seek sanctuary in that which we’ve so frequently denounced? What does our subconscious know that we don’t?

Perhaps it comes down to childhood and the fact that people like me, children of the seventies and early eighties when schools were still holding onto the fact that once they’d been forcibly bound to local churches and so we endured bible readings and hymns and other pomp and circumstance. All the information is in there, hidden in the back of our heads. Besides crying out for Father sounds slightly less pathetic than for mum.

Is that the point? Is that why some religions have a male Godly figure at the top of ecclesiastical system? God as the Father, the embodiment of heroism for many children. For young boys it is their father whom – it at least according to the Daily Mail when it slanders single mother families – provides a stable yet stern influence whilst showing the straight and narrow route to a future of stolid employment whilst for little girls, as Grease said, “the only man who isn’t going to let a girl down is her Daddy.”
Perhaps it’s this which explains the old fashioned aloof, stern faced, unemotional approach to Fatherhood that was once a cornerstone of a country struggling to be in touch with its emotions. A son’s relationship with his Father was supposed to be as complex and respectful as the one a young man has with his God, with his maker.

My own relationship with my Father is a lot simpler than it used to be. Growing up, we rowed in the ways which were inevitable. It was never anything serious, just differing of opinions and as a teenager it was impossible for me distinguish shades of grey – everything had to be black or white, right or wrong. But before then, my memories of being a very small boy hinge around the simplicity of riding high on park swings, firm hands catching and pushing me upwards, of being so excited that he’d returned home one evening I managed to toss myself down the stairs straight into his arms. Then as times toughened through the nineties, I got older and self-sufficient and he threw himself deeper into his work. I didn’t really understand the necessity behind it and became mildly jealous of other kids whose Dads appeared to be back for dinner on a Tuesday rather than still being somewhere on the M5 just south of Bristol.

All so celeb faux misery memoir of my hardship filled youth. I’m not trying for nor do I deserve your sympathy. Everyone differs from the generation before. My Dad sang in the church choir as a small boy, went to work at sixteen, reads the Telegraph and the Mail, votes Conservative and worked hard to provide for his family. He likes films with explosions and gentle, settling sit-coms; he listens to Neil Diamond and the Moody Blues; reads John Grisham and Robert Harris novels. Our differences are the same as everyone’s and, just like everyone else, I failed to realise it whilst I was growing up.

As an adult, however, I can only marvel at the humongous effort he undertook to ensure that we were well fed, warm and had a secure roof over our heads. I suspect in many ways he sacrificed all the self-indulgent rubbish I take for granted whilst lost in my head being concerned about things like rhino poaching that I can have little impact on whilst he, by my age, was already married with a child: me. My Father gave up a lot of things, but he never gave up me. Something many but by no means everyone can say. Like every relationship the Father-Son one is about the individuals involved which determines whether it’s a positive one or not. Little my Dad has ever done was ever for self-serving purposes; it was always for us and for that alone I owe him more than I can ever articulate.

It would seem inevitable, therefore, that fathers and father figures, whether heroes or not, are in part defined by their children and – at least for the context of this argument - specifically by their sons.

To be continued.

Everything bad happens in the rain

2011-11-15T22:51:00.002Z

The end of last week’s blog fades up to the rafters. The audience peers into the darkness. There’s an anxious shuffling amongst the dark and a spotlight flips on. To start with it shines just away from the slithering presence on the boards; only a grey suited elbow is clipped by the silver ray. With some kerfuffle, where initially the beam sprays across the room, it settles on the slight, surprisingly short man with a grey badger streak to his hair that matches his suit. The only flash of colour is the deeply dark red tie. He looks slightly hunched as his eyes squint under the bright light. He takes a final half step towards to the microphone, one of those old large circle ones from the nineteen thirties that partially obscure the speaker’s face.

He clears his throat, a rough grating harumph that catches in the mic and radiates around the room. He half-glances down to his hands folded together at his midriff and then, with the tiniest, almost imperceptible smile, he opens his mouth to speak.

But we don’t stop to listen to poor Ed Miliband because we know what he’s going to say. His mouth will be opening and closing, but the words won’t be his. They’ll be those decided by committee, reviewed by focus groups to see how supporters and haters will react and dragged into the crowded centre ground. It’ll be nothing new, anyway. An understanding that there must be cuts; an acknowledgement that the future will be tough, but that by working together we can make a new economy. Poor Ed. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ed. I think he’s great. In the Labour leadership campaign I thought he ran a better, more left-leaning, more grass roots of the party focused campaign. I’d vote for Ed, I’d probably vote for brother David too, mind, because, at the very least, I think, compared to the current floppy-haired, over lacquered occupant of the big chair, they at least give a shit.

Regardless I still feel sorry for Ed. Nobody’s listening to him. Nobody’s listening to him, because it’s not just me who can predict what he’s going to say. It’s everyone. You get the impression he’s kept on a leash by his party handlers, too fearful of letting him saying anything truly original or vaguely controversial in case he’s lampooned and instead he ends up being mocked for his very dullness.

It wasn’t always like that. It might seem fanciful in an age of twenty-four hour news coverage, but once upon a time our politicians were larger than life and had that mystical otherness which suggested that they might change the world for the better. The real world. The one people lived in. The rhetoric of the great reforming Liberals of the early twentieth century was not only capable of stirring the masses to exaltation, but was followed up with real action that eventually dragged Britain out of the workhouse and laid the ground work for the major reforms of the late forties to take place. The NHS. Pensions. The welfare state. Mortar which held together the society that gave a shit. The politicians who survived Queen Victoria would never be elected now. They’d be seen as too rogue, too maverick for national office. Lloyd George and Asquith both led lives filled with women and dubious money and fateful misadventure and bitter slighted enemies who would ensure their foibles were routinely plastered over the papers in the twenty-first century. Attlee would have been too boringly unphotogenic. Bevan too wildly Welsh. Even Churchill, the man held up as a pinnacle of British spirit and wouldn’t-it-be-marvellous-if-all-our-children-turned-out-like-Winston, in 2011 would have had his exceptional drink habit exposed.

In those days it was easier for a politician to bend reality to his will, to control the story so that he was always a hero. Lloyd George, in 1918, emerged from the First World War as the man who’d won it, who’d finally ended the slaughter and with victory no less. He was the man the people loved for his reforming budget despite the dead bodies growing mountainous over in Flanders. They loved him so much that a congratulatory biography of his life was filmed, which Lloyd George’s office quickly quashed simply because it wasn’t theirs.

In contrast, Tony Blair must wonder if he’s ever going to get his appearance back. He’s continually ridiculed and accused of ever more fanciful crimes. From the, when broadcast, near-future The Trial of Tony Blair, where he awaited his fate for war crimes, to the contemporary The Hunt for Tony Blair where he is chased across a noir-parody, sleeps with Margaret Thatcher and murders anyone who crosses his path, including tossing Robin Cook down a Scottish scree slope. Criticism of our leaders has become virtually post-modern, a pastiche of itself as we begin to muddle Blair with an unending mess of actors who’ve tried their hand at his peculiar mannerisms and faux charm.

Perhaps this reflects our deep lying disappointment with him? And them all.

As regular readers know, years ago I planned to write a short story about my disappointment with the Labour government and with Blair in particular. The 1997 dawn at the pinnacle of my teenage years heralded so much none of which really came to pass. Sure, there’s the minimum wage, vastly improved NHS, public services that worked for a while, the climate change act, child poverty and crime rates reduced, reformed city centres, but there’s also wasted opportunity of a majority, university fees, catastrophic bust and war after war after body after lie. I never could find the words to express quite how frustrated I was with how it had gone wrong. Tony the smiling, “pretty decent guy” who’d promised to usher in a new, cleaner age of politics was gone. Admittedly he had swept aside the Tory sleaze of toe sucking, cash for questions, arms dealing, oil smuggling, prison and health service disinterest and education incompetence that had riddled their way through a whole cabinet like the dark dreams of the underworld, but in their place were the backhanding, cash for honours, document sexing-up, invading, gun-toting, Bush-and-Clinton arse licking, Cliff Richard holidaying, verbal tick caricaturing, demon-eyed, dead man walking that was all centred around Blair himself. How do you write that?

You can’t and that’s why, rather than a single big denouncement, a Profumo moment, the satirists and writers and comedians had to pick away, until there was nothing left but a fiction. We took arguably the last man capable of being a political hero and we reinvented him as a work of fiction to make his failures and his lies less harmless.

We’d done it before with our hate. We made Thatcher vulnerable with our words, in fictions like Grant Morrison and Paul Grist’s masterful St Swithin’s day. That was a tale of teenage broken heart so yearnfully realised through the partnerless dance-swaying amongst the midnight railway carriages, to the La’s There She Goes which played in his head long after the batteries of his walkman had died. No-one believed his hurt and so he did what any sensible love-lorn teenager would do, blame his ills on society. After all, it was a society butchered into no such thing by the woman elected to the office of power, Mrs T. There’s a gun (or was there?) in a plastic bag (or maybe it’s just a notebook). It doesn’t matter. All he had to do was get close enough, amongst the crowds in the St Swithin downpour, the rains which signalled yet another washed out summer, get close enough to catch her cold blue eye and to whisper, ever so quietly:

‘Bang.’

Because they’re all fallible in the end. They all fall in the end. Even big bad Silvio Berlusconi. God, we think we have some ill-deserving fuck-wits running Britain, how did a first world country manage to keep electing a man whose sole interests in governing appear to have been ejaculating across and into as many women as possible, preferably in a sun-drenched private villa at the public expense? Simple, he controls all the media. The picture we see of a power-crazed, plastic face tightened, hair transplanted, megalomaniac sex fiend prepared to drag an entire continent into the ocean just to get laid one more time, isn’t shown in the same light in Italy. Contrary to the snarky British view that the Italians probably don’t care, that they think he’s some kind of idealisation of the Mediterranean psyche, rather it is they don’t know.

So, maybe it is impossible to build up any single individual to believe they might change the world through politics in this country ever again, but at least we’re not going to have a prime minster more interested in bunga-bunga parties than impending financial disaster. Playing polo and serving the interest of Daddy’s friends in business, yes, but then we knew that last year and we still, sort of, elected them. More fool us.

I wish it were otherwise, but I don’t think it’s Ed’s who’ll save us. I don’t think any modern politician is, could or even should be the answer. There’s too much of a necessity to be practical, or political if you will, and too much subsequent awareness of such actions for them to be iconic; for them to be untainted; for them to appear more idealistic than human; for them to be heroes.

So, we’ve discarded high and low culture, science, sport and state. There’s not much left. If we pick apart society’s layers there might be one last cowering group, huddled underneath a damp mushroom head in the corner. Church.

Yeah, I know. It’s called a God reflex.

Self-made hero

2011-11-09T21:41:00.002Z

When I was a young teenager I would while away damp lifeless Sunday afternoons in my room reading and losing myself inside my head. I was, I find myself forced to admit, into comics about superheroes and magicians and fantasy characters often written by people with over-inflated senses of high drama. Somewhere along the way I muddled my admiration for the story’s turn with a sense that these tales might be telling me something more. Whilst other kids were still just about fantasising about scoring the winning goal in the FA cup final or discovering a cure for dementia I was looking for the secrets of life in four-colour pamphlets.

I got over it in the end. Music and girls and proper books without pictures became more important, but still I would let my mind drift into images of the impossible. Save the world? Pah, I couldn’t even stay awake during class.

This meandering narrative which I’m trying to explain is about heroism. Not real heroism. Not saving people from burning buildings without flinching but idealistic heroism, an idea of the hero as an abstract. Something to believe in. We, all of us, need those sorts of heroes in our lives. Ideals can be false, but they can also bring us hope. As the global economy teeters towards wilful self-implosion of greed where do we look for inspiration? If there was any righteous anger behind the opportunism of the kids that ripped apart London and Birmingham and Manchester and, God, even Gloucester one week in August then wouldn’t be better if that could be articulated into something better than nicking shit?

So, for those of you who haven’t been keeping up: Sportsmen may bring a sense of drama, they break hearts and offer elation, but surely it’s only ever fleeting? You could call in entertainment, even something which has the potential to unify peoples but it lacks the ability of communication to offer a message. Scientists may well be great men and women, striving for the betterment of society even if the by-product is personal glory, but their objectives and methods are too far out of most people’s realms of understanding. Writers, alas, are possibly too anonymous as individuals. So where do people look? To whom will they still listen?

I can’t remember when I last fell in love with a band. Or, if not a band for there’s often something more functionally workmanlike about a band, then a pop star. I do still get arguably too obsessed about music meant for the young when I’m a thirty-something, but it is one thing to be nodding appreciably at the drum riffs or the myriad range of influences being cleverly note-checked it is quite another for them to matter more than life.

Of course, once upon a time it was easier. There was an enemy. These days Tinne Tempah talks in management speak about his global brand, but once youth hated the establishment whoever it was. Thatcher in the eighties or Wilson in the seventies, the “man” was always someone to push against. Pop could harness the natural rebellion of the teenager into listeners. Sid Vicious and Adam Ant, Jarvis Cocker and Pete Townsend, Elvis Presley and Dizzie Rascal, the purpose of the pop star has always been to be confrontational; to stick two, preferably outlandishly garbed, fingers up at government and encourage teenagers around the world to slam their doors and play it fucking loud.

So they’re the ones, the last ones left who can help us. Right?

Well, no. Not really. Sorry.

Billy Bragg, the champion of the downtrodden wearily romantic lost causes everywhere, appeared in the Guardian at the weekend in conversation with Johnny Flynn about the St Paul’s protestors. By coincidence I’d first heard of Flynn, an earnest floppy haired young singer-songwriter with some acting in his back pocket, the night before. He’s appearing in the play Jerusalem, which my girlfriend and I are going to see soon, and someone insisted on playing us some of his songs. “It’s the most amazing music ever,” she gushed. It’s not, but that’s kind of beside the point. No, the curious point was Flynn’s claim that in 2011 it’s harder for pop stars to play a part in the end of capitalism protests, to have a platform for any articulated voice because the charts are dominated by X-Factor sponsored rubbish.

But then it’s always been like that. Just think of The Osmonds, Boney M, Chicago, Mud, and any number of shit seventies plastic pop bands. Punk was partially a nihilistic resistance to society but it was also a protest against there not being any music to love aside from Iggy Pop. Even Bragg’s earliest stuff was more about East End teenage heartbreak and not wanting to be in Pink Floyd than the more clear political agenda of the red-wedge eighties.

The disadvantage today’s politically aware musical rebels have is that the X-Factor tripe has a multi-million marketing campaign absorbed by millions of dribbling brain drains on a Saturday night. It’s as though it takes pride in being the optimisation of the giant disco hits album available in the supermarket that the Clash had such disdain for, but still everyone laps up the advertising like its entertainment in itself.

So, if pop hasn’t ever really tried to lead us, what about their precursors as the representation of the teenage wet dream, movie stars? Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, an ever changing cast of smouldering dark eyes in the skull of young men questioning what the future was for, fighting against the establishment with sexual deviancy, powdered thrills and broken down livers. Only Errol Flynn became sufficiently confused to believe his own legend when, drink sodden and without a bow and arrow in sight, he flew off to Cuba to report on and play a part in the revolution.

We can’t really blame them for failing us. I mean, they were only ever supposed to be acting, but they would be so beautifully outrageous that we’d occasionally forget. We’d imagine they could be something more, something greater than us. Today’s movie stars are too well media briefed to ever wander off message and say something that matters to anyone other than to the people whom they’re making money for. As Noel Gallagher, to return to music, recently said about the Arctic Monkeys and Kasaibian, they’ve got the tunes but you just want them to start sounding like pop stars. Say something controversial for god’s sake. No-one’s paying you to be nice boys. We want you to live a life so that we don’t have to.

Droning self-indulgent drip Ed Sheeran makes Lego models to relax for fuck’s sake. I can do that, if I wanted to. He’s supposed to be offering something more, but at the moment I can see the puppet strings of reality. If we’re to love our pop or movies stairs we need to believe in them wholeheartedly. True adoration comes when we’re fooled and they transcend reality. It’s never been about the politics or the hidden message. Sorry, Paul Weller, people loved the tunes and the brashness of Eton Rifles and Going Underground and a Town Called Malice, they loved your skinny trousers and sparkling shoes and the tight hair cut, they loved you more than they loved Margaret but they could never quite join in with your hate. That’s why they kept on electing her.

We need a hero. The St Paul’s protesters are being accused of not knowing what they want when asking for in an alternative to capitalism, of hypocrisy when they wee in Starbucks, of slipping off home at night to a comfy bed. Tuh. What’s a middle class revolutionary to do? Can’t pee in the streets, the concrete is tough on the hips as you get older and as for coming up with a whole new economic system that needs global buy-in? Come on, surely it’s just enough to be asking the question rather than blindly following. So they, we, need a hero of some sort and if music and film aren’t going to provide them, then perhaps we better make them up.
Because sometimes what you make up comes true.

To return to my younger, more teenage self, reading late at night by the lamp stuffed down the bed, face splotched with zits, hair just beginning to snake down to the edges of my collar. One of my favourite comics was Hellblazer starring John Constantine. Constantine was a trench-coat wearing, chain smoking, sarcastic, heavy drinking mage made out to look like Sting in a cheap suit and a hell-blood stained tie. Alan Moore invented him in the eighties and claims to have met him shortly afterwards. In a cafe.

“All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine. He was wearing the trench-coat, a short cut—he looked—no, he didn't even look exactly like Sting. He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner.”

Jamie Delano who took over writing chores after Moore, had a similar experience outside the British Museum. “I didn't realise I'd walked past him until I'd gone fifty yards down the road, I looked round, and he was just vanishing round the corner.”

For a while, I completely believed in this idea that you could write stuff into existence. Grant Morrison, writing the bonkers conspiracy end of the millennium psycho-babble romp that was the Invisibles, claims that by shaving his head and buffing up to look like the main character he began to take on the fictional characteristics, even to the point that when he put his invention through a torture scene Morrison’s own body collapsed and replicated the ailments, all the way down to blood poisoning, a collapsed lung and a rotted hole in his cheek. Morrison, allegedly, almost killed himself through writing.

More recently, in a performance art piece, Moore claimed another encounter with Constantine: "Years later, in another place, he steps out of the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: ‘I'll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.’"

And then the spell is broken, because it’s too wry and too knowing. It’s too close. I can see the strings again as Moore uses the invented anecdote to make a joke, to prove a point about the reality of magic. Fictional heroes, they’re all mysterious and enticing, but they’ll only ever go and let you down.

After all, they are only made-up. Just like Pete Docherty. I had a moment, sometime around 2004, where I latched onto the idea of the Libertines as a band for tomorrow. It only lasted for a few months, but briefly I almost loved them in the way a late teenager loves a band. Especially a band that carried around their own lyrical myths of country and self and lifestyle; a band with an ideal for living. And I then woke up, the bodies began to pile up, and I realised that they were just a gang of wannabe musicians led by a self-centred drug addict. You can’t bring fictions into the real world by making them up and you can’t apply the mythical inventiveness to real people; we’ll only be disappointed.

No, if their hero is going to mean anything it needs to come from the real world and be able to make a difference. Mr Milliband, the stage is yours.

(Part 1 to be concluded next week).

The truest poetry is the most feigning

2011-11-01T22:04:00.002Z

In the sixteenth century, Deptford was both different and the same as it is now. There were no high rise tower blocks and backed up motorised traffic struggling to get through the Rotherhite tunnel, nor would there be the occasional mislaid tourist up from Greenwich and the market wouldn’t have had racks of Domestos and Andrex knocked off through the backyard of the Tesco’s distribution warehouse, but still, there would have been festering vegetable waste in the drains, an undercurrent of violence, of poverty through aimless men sitting around on street corners and it would persist as one of London’s forgotten areas. Back then it was dominated by the Royal Naval dockyards sitting on the estuary side of London, defending against potential invasion and aiding smugglers for a coin. Deptford was convenient for drafting in drunken lost souls from around the city. Deptford was the end of London, the last point before a lifetime aboard the waves whether that was the way you wanted to go or not. It was a place that people came for looking for trouble.

One imagines the Dog and Gun has changed little since then. It is a traditional boozer with a marvellous range of ales, but it lurks down a side street amongst a relatively run down estate and when I last went in there three men sitting along stools at the bar turned and stared, their gaze warned me to mind my own business.

It was a similar establishment, I imagine, where Christopher Marlowe holed up after his arrest for heresy in 1593. At the time, Marlowe was one of the most famous men in the land. A playwright extraordinary, dandily dressed, handsome like a cherub and possibly an Elizabethan spy. What he was doing in Deptford, amongst the rough and tumble of rum drinking sailor dens is unclear, as is so much about his life and death. Perhaps he was hiding out amongst the dregs of the city for the false glamour of it all; perhaps he was about to embark on some secret foreign mission or to flee for asylum abroad. All we know is that he became embroiled in an argument that ended with a rapier penetrating his right eye and then his brain. He bled to death in the gutter outside down amongst the urine and turnip cores and fish intestines and the thousand other dead men of a generation. The man arguably destined to be the greatest playwright of his age was cut down in some booze filled row, or silenced for the too many secrets he had in his head. Too fast too young is not, after all, a twentieth century concept. Marlowe went down aged twenty-nine having already lived a life.

The title of the bard rather than merely being a bard could have been within his grasp. The incredible Dr Faustus may have only been the first building block towards a canon unrivalled for half a millennium, Instead the title was taken by his contemporary, the no doubt equally raucous, but significantly less glamorous, playwright, actor, husband, father, middle of the road man from the middle of the country, William Shakespeare. Or was it?

Unsurprisingly for a death that involved the threat of high treason, religious defilement, whispers of then-perversion, the alleged perpetrators dying is custody and a handsome, quick-tempered dramatist, strange myths linger around Marlowe’s death. The most common is that he faked his own death in Deptford, hoped on a clipper headed out to sea and spent the rest of his life ghostwriting Shakespeare’s plays from a Tuscan retreat whilst conducting the odd act of espionage for the Queen and Country.

As anyone stumbling over a review of what looks like a pile of trite melodrama masquerading as historically accurate film, Anonymous, knows there are conspiracy theories are abound that Shakespeare was nothing more than a front for a wide range of alternative playwrights. The film decides that the Earl of Oxford is the real man behind the pen. “People like me don’t write plays, people like you do” he declares, whereupon, in the trailer I had the misfortune to see the other evening, he tosses a manuscript in the face of a half naked young William, who has presumably been disturbed from a drink-sodden evening defiling a pub wench, as an actor’s bohemian, even if the concept hadn’t been invented yet, lifestyle demands.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was put forward as the real writer of the canon in 1920 by, the appropriately named, J Thomas Looney. The basis for this is the intricate knowledge of the royal court system Shakespeare displays, the fact that Oxford was a champion of poetry and art and was probably Shakespeare’s patron whilst William himself was an uneducated oik, and that many of the plays, especially Hamlet, reflect de Vere’s own life. In other words, they’re nothing but shrouded autobiography. This ignores the fact that Shakespeare was appointed to the royal court and that many of the plays are based on other fictional works or actual history. Shakespeare was a precursor to the likes of Neil Gaiman, the sort of author who happily pinches bits here and there of different myths and half-remembered legends until some sort of flimsy fictional shroud comes into being.

My favourite bit of evidence is the suggestion that the code E.Vere appears 17,000 times in Shakespeare’s forty-odd plays. Given that it can be found in ‘every’, ‘ever’, ‘never’, and so on I’m surprised it’s not more. Still, lots of things are surprising about Shakespeare, not least that I struggled with it at school.

Even though most of what I read at the time was accompanied by pictures, I didn’t struggle with the language particularly. I may have initially found myself flummoxed by the sonnet structure and the odd archaic word, but all teenagers, except the exceptionally precocious, do. I got the lyricism and even enjoyed the, in hindsight, somewhat over-analysis of the plays. Line by line we went, seeking quadruple meaning in every pretty turn of phrase as though determined to prove that genius has to shine in every third turn of the plot. In retrospect it should have been enough to just appreciate the language’s rhythm and the clever metaphors for what they were; phrases that four hundred later still told us something new about the world and our place in it.

Anyway, it wasn’t a lack of understanding it was more that the deeper the comprehension the more I found it a little boring. Maybe it was partly because we flew through Macbeth one summer term and then spent three years dissecting Romeo and Juliet act by sodding act. I wanted to like it. I liked reading and I liked books; I theoretically liked the theatre although at thirteen had limited experience of it beyond the obligatory Christmas panto. Yet it wouldn’t quite click for me.

In many ways, I blame Romeo and Juliet and thus by proxy William himself, for my abandonment of English Literature at sixteen. The over-analysis broke down the work, the magic, so that all that was left was a combination of familiar phrases and reinterpreted myths slouching across a plot riddled with holes. Nothing was left but a bruised and bloody, used and soggy script, an idea of fiction destroyed. I didn’t want that to happen to all the other heroes I loved: Conrad’s colonial adventurers, Greene’s spies, another Marlowe, this one with a cheap suit and wry series of put downs, the myriad characters that filled up Terry Pratchett’s and Douglas Adams’ novels. They were all three dimensional beings for whom I didn’t want to understand how the mortar that held them together was nothing but words. I preferred to think of them as almost people; as though they might just about exist beyond the page, whisked from my sub-consciousness and out, out somewhere into the real world. There were, I felt, too real not to exist.

So, it was only as an adult that I finally came to Hamlet and Othello, Shylock and Lear, Benedick and Beatrice and all those marvellous histories (my enjoyment of which was no doubt enhanced by studying the war of the roses for A level meaning I understood who all the Richards and Henrys were). And slowly I began to understand that what made them great characters was their complexity. I’d missed the bleakness melancholy, the otherworldly knowing authorial hand behind Greene’s, Conrad’s and Chandler’s words. (It is, after all, hard to spot). I read instead at a surface level of black and white. Good and evil. Shakespeare’s heroes were bigger than that, because life is bigger than that. It is a contrary, mixed up, muddling block not designed to make sense. ‘Couldn’t have’ doesn’t really apply, except when based upon the laws of science. Anything is possible, even people with little formal education explaining the complexities of the heart in choice, succinct lines.

Which is why the frantic urge to attribute the canon to anyone other than William is somewhat galling. Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I’s spymaster was the first alternative suggested to the author, allegedly because there are a couple of coincidences in metaphor between the two’s poetry and the plays, allegedly, contain numerous legal terms which Bacon, as Queen’s Counsel, would have known. Toss, yet people – academics no just vain-glorious movie directors – noisily look for truth where there is no lie.

They pick on the Earl of Derby for pretty much the exact same reasons as Oxford and get no closer. And these are just the serious suggestions. After them, then it becomes pretty much anyone who could have held a pen during the same period: Francis Drake (too busy being in charge of the navy, surely, and on the wrong side of the world at several key performance dates); Anne Hathway, William’s wife (which is just odd); Ben Jonson (more famous himself at the time); Thomas Kyd (usually in the debtors prison); Thomas More (already long dead); Mary, Queen of Scots (headless); James Stuart, Kind of England and Scotland (a child and then a monarch).

Out of all seventy-nine candidates proposed, the Marlowe theory at least has some possibility behind it. Jonson was almost as good as playwright and so comes close. Someone once wrote, “I admire Ben Jonson the most, but I love Shakespeare more.” But Jonson was too prolific in his own right to fit in an extra forty odd plays and also had an ego too big to allow a piece of work such as Macbeth to appear under anyone other than his own name.

Marlowe’s Faustus is held up as the direction his work is travelling in and it is indeed excellent. Although, no Hamlet or Lear. Besides, Shakespeare’s writerly trajectory is supposed to go entertainment (comedies), royal patronage (histories), despair (tragedies), melancholy, (the hard to place romantic-comic-tragedies of Alls Well that Ends Well, the Winter’s Tale and the Tempest). Marlowe was already on the tragedy arc by the time of his death and never seemed that interested in laugh-out-loud comedies let alone conventional pandering to the monarchy’s rather dubious claim to the throne. In 1593 Shakespeare only had half a dozen plays to his name, of which only Richard III could stand up to Dr Faustus. Would Marlowe really have taken a dozen steps backwards putting out filler work until mining the vein he’d already ripped open?

But the main reasoning behind the theory that Marlowe ended up in Tuscany and writing the plays, or indeed anyone else writing the plays, is Italy itself. Two Gentleman of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, the Merchant of Venice, Othello, again and again Shakespeare’s plays are based in Italy, a country Shakespeare never visited: why? Who knows? Who cares? They certainly weren’t based on any accurate representation of Italy. In The Merchant of Venice he even forgets to mention the canals. It’s made up. It’s fiction. You don’t have to go somewhere to write about it – especially in Elizabethan England where most of your audience had never left the home counties let alone ventured further afield. And even if they had it was probably to war and one imagines that a muddy field filled with canvas shelters, the taste of adrenaline and the echo of screams in the night air looks the same whenever or wherever you may be.

Italy? Pah. That isn’t a reason. The real reason that there is this debate, is class.

Because in this screwed up country during a particularly screwed up period of time, the Victorians and their immediate hiers couldn’t comprehend that a relatively uneducated lad from the Midlands was touched by genius. He had to be either a patsy or a thief, either covering up for his social better who, for reasons which slightly escape me, shouldn’t have been writing literature of such dazzling variety and quality, or a convenient pen name for a member of the early middle classes who had at least managed to trudge up from his parent’s Kentish shoe shop and attend Cambridge, as Marlowe did. The concept of the working class kid done well was forbidden.

And at least in terms of literature it remained so until the 1950s at least when the likes of Alan Stillitoe and John Osborne emerged, blinking into the published light, fresh faced and sporting chips the size of a mine on their shoulder to tell grimy realism of the north, drink, being poor and frustrated by it and desperate for the weekend to forget the tedium and physical harshness of the week. And, unlike George Orwell or (Lord help us) JG Priestley they weren’t middle-class observers but they had actually lived what they wrote about: a not watered down by agenda.

It was but a fleeting moment when the creative flourishers from a working class background flocked towards literature. It was before rock and roll and mass market television; before the lure of easy glamour and girls was attainable with slicked back hair and a guitar. Nothing but a brief period when ale in tankards mid-afternoon, a thousand cigarettes accompanied sensible coats that kept the inevitable rain off and cheap suits as the fashion of the class rebel.

Now, in twenty-first century Britain it almost feels like we’ve taken a step backwards. Sebastian Faulks, Zadie Smith and Adam Thirwell, all three of the British writers whom I’ve read recently went to Oxbridge. Clearly this is not an exhaustive sweep of the literary establishment and I’m making a generalisation about writers who come out of Oxford and Cambridge – a generalisation which I know for a fact to be incorrect - but the real point is that this doesn’t actually matter. I loved White Teeth and Politics. A Week in December was a bit meh, but it had a couple of good moments and it certainly didn’t lack for ambition. (Although, perhaps it was Faulk’s background that prevented him from fully painting his broad society landscape that he got close to, but that’s another discussion...)

Good writing is a good writing no matter whom it comes from. This isn’t a campaign for William Shakespeare as an early working class hero; it’s just an expression of disappointment that in 2011 we’re even having that conversation about someone whom should be amongst the nation’s heroes for giving us a language with which to argue.

Big bang better than theory

2011-10-25T22:22:00.002+01:00

“I’m going to save the world,” said the man with a glassy gleam to his eyes, “through the application of science.”

Or some similar sort of dialogue.

I’m sure you know the sort of thing. It happens in the moment during the ridiculous movie when lengthy exposition about something fundamentally impossible is only going to get in the way. So the writer, who really didn’t want to waste those sitting around hours, dropped in the shorthand version. It’s probably less prevalent these days if only because Wikipedia enables you to at least sound convincingly full of shit, but in those terribly glorious B movies the only scientific qualifications you needed was to be vaguely reclusive, have a creepily calm demeanour and to smoke a pipe.

In reality there is no such thing as science. Not really, it’s a complex collaboration of astrophysics, microbiology, hydro-chemistry and a hundred other sub-specialities. Sure, they all get to combine into one as science, but it’s a bit an uneasy alliance. Kind of like saying “fiction”.

Maybe the confusion is my fault, after all I do find it hideously complicated. Unfortunately, I had a habit of not paying attention at school when a subject was challenging, rather than struggle to gain ground I would just tune out. Science was one of the worst (after geography, maths, IT, design and graphics, French, German, and so on). Raised on the sort of movies described above, I was expecting science to be fantastical, but instead it all seemed somewhat mundane. Biology was little more than trying to remember by rote the correct anatomical correlation of our reproductive system or how photosynthesis worked, physics an extension maths with seemingly even less practical application and chemistry understanding how oil formed. Perhaps we did experiments, but I think we were mainly just taught theory. Things that went bang, smoking formulas bubbling over the top of test-tubes, leaping into the quantum physics divider to visit the fifth dimension? We didn’t actually get to try doing stuff ourselves.

State education, eh?

I’d completely expected science to be akin to magic. In the world in my head, science could be used to build space ships that could reach the universe’s perimeter. It existed in the same theoretical zone as serums that transformed skinny weaklings into buff athletes, radiation poisoned animals attached school boys with positive after-effects, bomb detonations didn’t always kill or lightning strikes that hit a specific combination of chemicals and splashing them over someone would create heroes. Okay, so I took my early years science education from comics, but I was expecting something which would illuminate a brighter, more exciting universe than suburban eighties Birmingham. Was that so bad? Instead I got systems of classification and basic electronics, neither of which were going to help me build a time machine.

I don’t think this was helped by my disruptive class. From the boy who routinely called out “I’ve got gametes up my nose” for no apparent reason to the couple who spent the entirety of every lesson trying for a practical biology demonstration it was somewhat difficult to concentrate. We were virtually riotous, scaring off one supply teacher by pelting her with insults so as the head of department arrived with a cricket bat to quell the noise. On one of the few times I recall actually were allowed to do any real experiments it almost always ended in disaster.

Disaster or fire.

I remember quite distinctly sticking the ends of paper aeroplanes in the Bunsen burner’s flame, blowing it out and imaging the smoke trail belonged to a real plane, a fighter jet maybe, crashing due to a missile strike on its tailfin or an engine malfunction. Incredibly I was thirteen, not six, at this point. When one of the even less tuned in kids did the same, he found suddenly holding burning paper to be disconcerting and so decided to get rid of it as soon as possible.

By dropping it in the waste paper bin.

Poomf.

Instant fire. Well done. Smoke and flames billowing, the no doubt exasperated teacher strode across the room to extinguish the fire.

By standing on it.

Whilst this did have the desired effect of putting the fire out, unfortunately, it didn’t do so before his trousers were burning.

In a panic about getting sufficient GCSEs to get into the local sixth form college I crammed Double Science because it was worth two and somehow ended up with BB despite not having seen a mark higher than a D on any work for years. When I went to university I found myself living with and then friends with an extended batch of scientists, mainly zoologists. I had no comprehension of the work they did. They would try to explain, but it would come across as gibberish. And yet there was a touch of envy on my part. I remember at least one conversation about the value of their studying over mine. History was worthless; an analytical appraisal of things which no longer mattered. Whilst the application of biological investigations had the potential for a profound impact upon society. Depending, of course, on what they found out. To an extent, they were right, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I couldn’t, at least not without the help of a scientist with dubious mental health and a fortress in an inclement mountain climate, rewire my brain.

So, science is clearly important and by definition, therefore, so must be scientists.

David Baddiel wrote very elegantly a couple of years ago about how scientists are the last heroes. Or to be slightly more accurate, that they are the last profession to be universally ordained as “great men.” (And for the purposes of this argument, I’m going to keep Baddiel’s definition of men, but we all know it can include women too, right?) James Joyce, he points out, was called a great man, a great writer by Erza Pound and TS Elliot, both of whom would have some claim on the title themselves, and so it became commonly agreed that indeed he must be. Yet if Ulysses were published in 2011 it would be pulled apart and bickered over – mostly via the internet – and any argument for its greatness would fail to reach a consensus. People would start sniping about his Irish background, his drinking, his failings as a teacher in northern Italy and how reliant on his wife he was. All irrelevant to the sentences on the page, but try telling the baying masses that.

But scientists are different. They’re more revered, because we don’t understand what they do. If someone cures cancer they will automatically – and correctly – be acclaimed as great. No debate amongst the masses. Perhaps this has always been the case, but whilst Shakespeare, for example, was ordained in genius fairly early on there seemed to be more reluctance to voice passionate support for medical scientists who advocated leeches for every ailment. Alexander Fleming, in contrasting example, and the discovery of penicillin must have been a revelation; a cure that didn’t have to be removed with a match. Anyway, perhaps today we recognise that scientists, whatever their field, have done, or are capable of doing, something which is so far from the everyman’s ability that it becomes almost inconceivable. In contrast, most people equipped with laptops think they can write a novel. Most people are wrong, but that’s kind of beside the point.

Margaret Atwood (no slouch herself, but rarely acclaimed as great without dispute) recently defined science fiction as being split into two types. Essentially, the fantastical and the exaggerated, or the Jules Verne versus HG Wells death-match. Verne, the man whose fiction was based at the edges of the scientific knowledge at the time and Wells who had Martians invade Woking.

Essentially, I believe – no doubt incorrectly – that you can divide real science into two equally matching sub-sections. (And, okay, numerous other bits as well, give me a break here). Jules Verne twenty-first century science is the science that keeps us progressing at a steady rate; it’s research into new medicines, computer engineering, formulas for hair dye and toilet cleaners and pesticides. Like the Mitchell and Webb Laboratoire Garnier sketch where the powerful and rich Monsieur Garnier gathers a team of crack scientists not to cure cancer but to formulate hair dye. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still inventive stuff which arguably improves people’s lives on a daily basis, but it’s still capitalism science. Science which supports the economy and, like the science I was subjected to at school, more than a little boring. HG Wells twenty-first century science is the hadron collider, it’s the inside of Stephen Hawking’s brain, expeditions to Mars and the international space station; it’s the sort of work where staff arrive thinking, “fuck, yeah, I’m a scientist, baby.”

Perhaps we plebs trundling through our daily, dreary lives can’t properly understand the distinction. And maybe that’s fiction’s fault. A few years ago I was crammed into the cattle shed commuter train at some ungodly hour and failing to concentrate on my book. It wasn’t helped by the young woman yattering excitedly down her phone. “Oh, I don’t mind the commute in, it gives me plenty of time to read,” she plainly lied as she’d spent the entirety of that particular journey yacking down the phone.

“Yeah, yeah. I read. I so read. Yeah, actual books. You know, like, science fiction.” She then named a couple of authors I’d never heard of, but it seemed to be of alien armada guerrilla marine testosterone never-ending serial bullshit sort beloved by their fans and bemoaned by everyone else. “Yeah, and when he gets his badass caught behind enemy lines then he breaks out the hyper-tension gatling gun and a neo-spike pill to keep the Bortch hordes at bay. Science faction, baby. Science faction, this shit is totally being reeled back to us from a better world.”

(Or something like that, anyway.)

The point is the use of the invented word, faction. Even if you accept that for those who love this sort of science fiction can be delightful, meaningless entertainment, it is not, it is never, trying to pass itself off as real life. I think, as a child, that was what confused me. It was written down and so I wanted it to be true. More than anything in the world, I wanted an exciting future full of space ships and epic journeys to beyond and back, of noble heroic captains and their rag-tag crews from the far corners of the galaxy and easily defined alien villains bristling with additional arms and spikey things. The drab greyness of reality where the bad guys are dressed in designer suits and shirts from Pink and either fucking up the economy, contesting your patents or disagreeing with your research funding has a sheen of boredom. It takes empathy to appreciate the underlying human drama.

Case in point: The suspension of operations by NASA and the apparent gradual winding down of space exploration operations by everyone (except China, India and Iran) is a shame. There’s a nice bit fairly early on in The West Wing when the Mars exploration probe ‘Galileo’ goes missing as it attempts to touch down on the red surface. Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett is disappointed because he sees space exploration as the natural extension of humanity’s strive for a better tomorrow. He even infuses ‘Galileo’ with more than a nominal nod to an Italian philosopher so as it becomes something greater, something more noble.

Yet it clearly makes complete economic sense, the average trip into space to pootle around and watch the sun come up over the Earth’s rim, costs – no doubt – the same as Belgium, the end of something as aspirational as the voyage to another planet, another solar system, is something to mourn. As Kevin Fong, a director of the somewhat implausibly named Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine (who I’ve met in real life and is a thoroughly nice guy, so apologies for his inclusion here) says it taught us to dream. The shuttle, despite apparently flying like an open safe still gave of an air of grace and beauty. It was the ideal vessel to touch the rim of knowledge, but for the time being it’s gone; we are earth-bound once more. Science is being beaten back by economics.

I know little about science, and actually I don’t care. I’m happy with that. I understand that ninety-nine percent of science isn’t as photogenic, not quite as phallic as a rocket launching out the desert and into space (and hopefully not as bad for the environment as something packed with sufficient fuel to give it the equivalent explosive capability of a small nuclear warhead). Whilst childish idiots like me want to be wowed, most science is done by people sitting at computers late into the Saturday night, ploughing through reams of data looking for the pattern, or lack thereof, which will give them an answer to the question: why?

And that’s true heroism. The risk of wasting a life time looking for better when there might be nothing. Real people’s mundane life cycle becomes heroism, greatness. Perhaps we should push our empathy further and find stories to write about this reality so as kids like me are happy to be bored for a couple of hours a week. Bored yet maybe just a smidge of something useful will be retained.

You know, for the future.

Balls. Balls and running.

2011-10-18T21:58:00.002+01:00

I am not, it may surprise you to learn, a big sports man. I have had moments where it may have appeared otherwise but these have been a facade. If I’m being really honest, I just don’t get it.

Even if I have pretended otherwise on many occasions.

My Father was a rugby player as a young man. Rugby and no doubt the associated high-jinks of the club filled, as far as I can tell from the affection which he speaks of tearing along the flanks with mud spraying in his wake, a large part of his life for many years. I don’t actually remember him ever playing, but I suspect buggered knees at a relatively young age and increasing job demands as much as the stresses of raising my infuriating infant self ate into his time too much. Still, it was this rather than football or cricket or, I don’t know, water polo, which he attempted to share his enthusiasm.

I was, I say with regret if only because it probably would have bought him happiness, lamentably bad. In many ways it was one of the few sports where I stood a slim chance. Speed, competent hand-eye coordination and graceful agility are not prerequisites. Indeed, fat, stocky kids who can get in the way make ideal forward props provided they are also brave and prepared to throw their face in the way of someone else’s boot. I wasn’t brave. I was the exact opposite, being particularly cowardly about the prospect of physical harm and so coupled with my inability to run, pass, kick or catch I was doomed for a brief rugby career. Even so, I did spend a year or so lurking around the edges of the school team – who clearly must have been pretty dreadful if they were considering letting me take the field – before my eagerness to take part in anything that wasn’t sitting in my room reading comics subsided and I spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings sleeping in later and later rather than jogging, slowly, around a frozen grass pitch.

As I have grown up and become more physically able I enjoy being outside doing activities. I don’t mind kicking a ball aimlessly around, although I could think of better things to do. I quite like swimming in the sea, although have no real interest in doing laps of a pool. I love hiking, canoeing, climbing, cycling – well, okay, maybe not love, but I am starting to enjoy cycling. The point is that I’m not a fat slob who gets out of breath taking a shit. I’m moderately fit; I do sporty type things.

And yet, I have very little interest in sport itself. I can drive and like driving fast and along difficult country lanes, but I cannot watch formula one without wondering whether I’ve died and gone to hell. Doing is not the same as participating, but sport is primarily a spectator activity. Far more watch football than ever lay on a chilly Sunday morning, happily berating foreign players for weather gloves and snoods whilst refusing to leave their electric blanket fuelled dens themselves. It’s entertainment, I get that, even if I don’t particularly find it entertaining.

People looked at me like I was mad when I made zero effort to secure Olympics tickets. To be honest, if I was there I would no doubt get swept up in the moment, be taken over by a crowd’s hysteria of anticipation on the verge of being squashed and fear that every loud noise is the thermite being detonated. I may even enjoy myself, but equally it may make me want to tug my eyeballs out and eat them as watching the games in Beijing did. I didn’t want to watch the games, but they were shown in the pub I tended bar for during my Masters. The afternoon shifts were far from busy and the time difference meant it was likely to be men’s third round hurdle-javelin hybrid blaring at high volume. It was either watch or play on fruit machines. Or read the Daily Mail. Anything to avoid talking to the midday drunk with tattoos on his knuckles and scurvy scabs at the corner of his lips.

So, next summer: I’m not sure I really want to risk spending money on an event that will leave me initially frustrated at the inevitable claustrophobia of the queues in and then potentially suicidal at the dreariness of it all. I’ll be okay if I skip this one. But people can’t believe me. I’m missing out, they insist, on a once in a generation experience of terminal public transport collapse. What will I do whilst the games are on? What other thing is there possibly to do? Get on with my normal life and read less news, I guess.

A working knowledge of football is, however, a necessity for a man trying to negotiate with the rest of the world. There’s a default presumption that you will support a team. My choice, for having a false one is usually easier than explaining otherwise, of Birmingham City is mainly based on their lack of success meaning few people know anything about them either so I am less likely to be caught out in any error. But, after several years of pretence it started to become genuine, as though I was an undercover agent gone native, unable to remember what was a lie and what wasn’t. The deeper I went the greater the required knowledge to engage in the banter. I was reduced to actually reading the BBC Sport’s section on an almost daily basis to keep up with the statistics and gossip the clichéd twists and fucking turns that defined any season. And this is, I think, largely my problem with sport. It refuses to let you be passive; you have to give money and become emotionally involved.

To be honest there was a part of me that quite enjoyed the time in my life when evenings out were dedicated to watching football as part of a group. Not, I should clarify, the time during the 2006 world cup when I went to a pub in Islington with my colleagues and someone, not one of us, spent the match’s duration berating with ever more elaborately offensive language England. He was English, but clearly the players weren’t trying hard enough as they huffed and puffed their way to a not terribly convincing, but rarely in doubt victory. If it was he in Germany then the whole thing would be sewn up with a series of solo wonder goals, presumably. But, alas, he was a fat, balding, drunk, abusive moron who couldn’t even manage to sing the relatively easy tunes in anything other than a howl. Twat.

It was easy enough to enjoy the camaraderie of rooting for the same team. Male bonding takes place in few areas, but amongst the beer heavy adoration of a well-struck goal it is fully acceptable to hug a near stranger with tears of joy in his eyes and some sort of politically incorrect xenophobia on his lips. I think, however the need to be constantly aware of a player’s form, their number of assists, the clichés associated with their temperament, build, mercenary or sexual activities simply requires too much homework. I have enough obsessions to tend to without feeling socially obliged to know Peter ‘good touch for a big man clichéd lanky twonk’ Crouch* international scoring record against major or minor teams. Yet without this knowledge the whole dramatic tapestry makes no sense.

(* I had sports commentary clichés by the way for this to work... I feel mildly ashamed.)

Yes, I did just say the whole “dramatic tapestry” because the one thing I do appreciate, indeed am even jealous of, is sport’s artificially created drama. The result is always achingly tense because there’s your whole life as a fan hanging on it. The heroes and villains are perfectly formed and operate in a world of clear cut moments, of death defying, child sacrificing importance. Real ife is more subtle and complex and therefore full of apathy; rolling along is easier than struggling to understand.

Those moments of anguish are impossible to create in any other medium. That’s why novels about sport are almost always rubbish because they are too contrived, too scripted. Even good ones are really about something else. David Peace’s Damned United isn’t about football, it’s about the destroying obsession of ambition and shyness drowned out by overconfidence. Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland isn’t about cricket, it’s about loneliness and despair and last chances post 9/11. Don DeLillo’s EndZone isn’t about American football, it’s... Actually, it’s a clunky analogy of warfare being everywhere so let’s just ignore that one.

There’s no real competition. Sport allows the dullness, the sort of tedium novel readers would burn, of a nil-nil draw, or a long fought out five day test match broken every half hour by rain, or Steve Davis playing snooker game to help prepare for the thrillingly where literally anything could happen. You really can’t actually make it up. For example, I’m reliably told that when Birmingham City won their first trophy for forty-odd years back in the spring against far superior Arsenal side it took the Londoner’s goalkeeper and defender to stop playing and watch the ball bounce in the air between them and roll away as they then, passively let the Birmingham striker score. If you tried to write something like that random sequence of events no-one would believe your ham-fisted prose. And yet, because actual football has the twenty-two independent spoilt, overpaid characters roaming freely each with their own calculated agendas trying to fuck it up for everyone else, people believe in the impossible.

In fact they crave for it. No-one cares if Andy Murray wins a long sequence of Masters titles and advances on the world number one spot. No, they want a jaw stretching scream of triumph and then the broken, sobbing mess of man clutching the base-line two matches later as he fails to win Wimbledon. Sport really, implausibly, matters to people, far more people than ever give a toss about fiction. And it matters, ridiculously, because they love drama; they want to have the thrill of the briefest high and then crushing despair for the majority. It’s kind of like crack-cocaine.

Wish I could write like that.

Fix up, look sharp.

2011-10-11T20:43:00.002+01:00

‘Are you going to a wedding?’ my colleague asked the other Tuesday morning.

‘Um, no.’

‘I’ve never seen you looking so smart.’ Then she burst into hysterical laughter, slapping her knee with unrestrained glee.

I have, it appears, something of a reputation for scruffiness. One that, to be honest, is well founded. My shirts are frequently rumpled. My face often cast by a few days of shadow. My hair ruffled to varying degrees depending upon how many seconds I have in front of the mirror that morning. I may well own some shoe polish, but I’ve long lost it. Outside of the work place, the theme continues with my shirts open a couple of buttons too many, scuffed trouser rims, holes here and there and a general sense of being dishevelled.

I wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time I cared and whilst, it could be argued, I frequently failed at I least tried. But what began as a money saving exercise during my Masters became more of a way of life. I developed a determination that appearance required time and time was something precious. If my degree wasn’t going to gift me a book deal and I had to go back to work, then I wasn’t going to waste additional minutes ironing when I could be writing.

Deep down I always knew it would be like this. That is to say it would be hard. Objectively I understood that most things worthwhile doing are difficult. At no point did I genuinely believe that a career of letters, writing and general self-indulgence in being lost inside my head beckoned and all I had to do was spend a year talking pretentiously about words to enable it. That would be silly. But then I do like to dream.

Daydreams, unfortunately, have been somewhat omnipresent in my life. I am far too willing for my imagination to slip away from wherever I am supposed to be and to wonder about somewhere else; another time, another place, another person I might have been. Which is ridiculous. My lot in life is pretty good, and yet I’ve always been like this.

I remember quite clearly attending first year junior school, when I would have been seven or eight years old. One wall of the class room was entirely taken up by a window, from lino floor to stained ceiling, from blackboard to dented lockers. The teacher was of the old style where rote and repetition was the basis of learning. And so on she droned; on and on about, well, who knows. Whatever seven year olds were supposed to learn in 1986. I don’t remember, but I do recall looking out the window towards the playground and the sloping grass bank that ran alongside the school and thinking about all the things that the slope could be. Covered in snow and sledged along. Skidded down in wet grass. A point of momentum for the terrorists who were coming to seize control of the school and hold the area at gunpoint until a valiant resistance, spearheaded by myself, could wrest control of some of their weapons and lead a fight-back.

Ahem.

For some reason, that later scenario was a daydream I often indulged in. I cast myself as the seven year old hero who gets the girl and beats the baddies.

I was something of a strange child.

But I digress (sort of). Let’s return to me sitting and gazing out the window, completely lost in the scene unfolding inside my head. Ow! A sharp slap across the back of the skull snaps me back into the tedium of school life and the dream is not broken, but paused, ready to be restarted the next moment reality gets a bit too much.

I was bored and I wanted something more exciting to happen. Something so exciting that life would never be the same again.

It was a problem that persisted long after I should have grown out of it.

When I was a teenager I spent hours meandering around the local streets (usually delivering newspapers to be entirely fair to myself) submerged in dreams of what if and glory. I wanted to be in a rock and roll band. I wanted to write stories. I wanted to act. I wanted to be a politician. I wanted to burn out and be finished by my mid-twenties. I wanted to be the centre of everyone’s attention and for them to love me for it and to miss me when I was gone. Daydreams were solace to hide in. The problem was, aside from some pretentious short stories and scripts for comics I was too talentless to draw, I didn’t really do anything about it. Certainly, I expended far greater effort in the imaging than in the actual doing.

Inertia was never really going to make me popular with the girls.

This attitude persisted into adulthood. Maybe it was inevitable given the long periods of time life made available when I could be thinking about what might else have been. Long lonely drives across the country, almost moving the car subconsciously, my mind not really there but wistfully imagining whilst a more rewarding life. Or the hours spent hiking when the weather closes in and you pull inside your waterproofs and conversation evaporates as you mechanically concentrate on one foot in the front of the other. But there’s still space in your head for unrealised aspirations, to wonder of different futures and maybes and perhaps and what would have happened if I’d done it first or differently, said no, or stepped left.

Eventually, I did do something about it. Despite the long hours of my day job, I began to write more diligently. I put in time every night and most weekends, submerged myself and dragged the things in my head out onto the page. I even got some results. I told myself to go for it properly, to stop thinking and start doing. I told myself time and again that it wouldn’t easy, that it would require effort and disappointment and grief and frustration and maybe even a little blood. But I couldn’t stop myself.

During my year of self-indulgence, I would writing in the mornings and then go for long afternoon walks, ostensibly to compose “lyrical masterpieces” in my head, but almost inevitably my mind would empty and either the latest domestic issue – needing to service the car, or paint the bedroom properly, or what to have for dinner – would trickle in and once that was clear, well then there would just be the void. The imaginative chasm which would slowly flood with first a completed manuscript and then an excited call from the agent I’d sent it to and then, finally, an actual, real printed novel bearing my name at the masthead.

My dreams would come true.

That is, if they weren’t just dreams.

I sit now at my new desk in my new flat. Somewhere amongst my files is a growing stack of rejection slips. I thought that I’d done the hard bit. I’ve completed a manuscript, but now the dreamy bit doesn’t seem to be happening. The truth is that I’m not trying hard enough. I haven’t sent out any pitches for months allegedly because I didn’t know where I’d be living.

Here, I’ll tell you a secret. The real reason is that I’m scared that when I’ve sent it to everyone the dream will still be just that; nothing.

At the moment there is still possibility, although of most intangible unrealistic variety.
But there’s a new home and another new, better life. I have more chance than many if I have the determination. On the way home from work this evening I glanced over a fellow commuter’s shoulder at the magazine they were holding. The cover said ‘What chance does Amanda Knox have for the life she dreamed of?’ Maybe the question should be about Meredith Kercher’s dreams, but the comparison shames me. It’s time to get my act together. It’s time to reboot. I’ve been spending too much time on the fun stuff, the making shit up, the actual writing and avoiding not the difficult, scary part where I try to force other people to read my work.

It’s time to smarten myself up. So, I’ve been ironing hot creases into my shirts, I’ve been shaving most days, I’ve started to take care in my appearance not because I am giving up and returning to the office career trajectory, but simply because it is time to take myself seriously. It is time to do, rather than looking for excuses to keep on dreaming.

The razor bites into the hair on my chin; the new blade wrenches the follicle from the root. Underneath the flesh is raw and the splashed water and alcohol on my face stings. Nice and sharp.

Like lemon and gin in the open wound.

Like jealous nails gouging for the eyes.

Like used syringes in the ice cream.

It’s time to wake up.

Monty got a raw deal

2011-09-24T07:17:00.002+01:00

It was an early evening approaching the end of the summer and the last of the tired light dragged itself across the patio slabs at the back of my friend’s parents’ house. The day was coming to an end and soon it would be time for me to go home. His sister, older by four years and thus a generation of life away from our thirteen year old end of innocence, had just got back from her Saturday job at Woolworths. She liked working there, listening to the rustle of her polyester uniform as it frazzled against her skin, against the plastic surface where she propped her elbows up and rested her chin in her hands to distractedly watch boys even older saunter past outside in the central square, underneath the wilting fountain waters. At some point in the non-too distant future I would want to be one of those boys in leather and demin hanging around with not much to do, but not that afternoon. I was interested in the girls in my class, I liked how their body shapes were beginning to change, but I didn’t really understand why. It was easier to just sit around the bedrooms of other just about teenage boys listening to worn down cassettes of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell and Anthrax’s Spreading the Disease, and Megadeth’s Killing is my Business...and Business is Good copied from library loans, thrashing our non-existent long hair with jerky neck throbs.

But the main reason she loved working in Woolworths was because she got a discount on new records and tapes and CDs. She’d got a CD player the previous Christmas and the staff reduction made the otherwise prohibitively expensive albums within reach. “But only for special albums,” she’d said. “The ones that matter. Everything else, I’ll still get on tape.”

That evening she clasped her latest purchase by a band I’d never heard of. The cover showed some odd drab grey spiked cube, like a tool for demolishing houses but with added spikes; an industrial mace; an extension to a space station. She put the album on and gently jangling guitar that sounded lazily tedious echoed across the room and a soft vocal gave us arcane instructions: “smash, crack, bushwacked, tie another one to the rack, baby.”

I didn’t think much of it.

The album was Automatic for the People, the band were REM.

It feels odd to think today that there was a time when I neither knew who REM were nor thought much of their music. The band, all their albums, but that one in particular, came to soundtrack a lot of my life, always dipping away and then returning fresh and ready to play over whatever events were taking back and now they’re gone. REM, once the biggest band in the world, after fifteen albums and thirty-one years have gone home for good.

Curiously, for a band who were once straddling the planet with singles which were inescapable and smart albums that both rocked and tugged on heart strings their passing seems to have been met by a mixture of satisfied “good, should have gone years ago” and surprise that they were still active, despite Collapse into Now being released earlier this and reaching number 5 in the UK charts. Perhaps that in itself is a sad indicator of how easy it is to top the album charts in these days of single track downloads unlike when Monster, Out of Time and New Adventures in Hi-Fi sold millions in the mid nineties.

Unlike many of today’s bands they also took it slowly. Whilst debut album Murmur is brilliant not too many people thought so at the time. It sold moderately well and they continued to tour and release records, but it wasn’t until The One I Love, with its frequently misunderstood chorus of sexual misanthrope, was an unexpected hit from album number five that they edged towards the big time with barbed, smart and rocking songs of loss and times disappeared. Now, even more so than then, debut albums seems to explode onto the scene and acts fade from view without the time to grow.

Despite giving a foundation for most guitar-based music over the last twenty years, from grunge to Britpop and then the slew of nu-indie a few years ago, REM seem to be continually accused of musical irrelevance. To whom should they be relevant? There seems to be an endless need to stay forever young only to be eventually reborn as an elder Statesman able to give sage, gravely-voiced, emotionally cracked advice to the younger peers, but then, REM were never a normal band. An intelligent group who sang songs on obsession and environmental concern and pleas against suicide and tributes to long-gone comedians, relevance be damned they nearly always had something to say without descending into tedious he loves she doesn’t stadium rock filler.

And anyway, those much maligned latter period albums after Bill Berry’s aneurism and then retirement aren’t as bad as they’re often derided to be. Sure, they had strong competition – not least within in their own back catalogue – and despite the occasional bit of fluff there are good songs to be found. Up, may be a bit of a muddled mess, but Daysleeper is a great song and At My Most Beautiful is self-fulfilling in its title. Reveal is a little too sugar addled for my tastes, but All the Way to Reno is wonderfully lost. Around the Sun may be musically tepid, all heavily programmed keyboards set to soggy scope, but Michael Stipe is at his lyrical best singing mournful tales of heartbreak and the collapse of a national ideal. Accelerate is all punky aggression and energy almost shocking for men hovering around their fifth decade to be sweating out.

But those very early records, Document, Murmur, Fables of the Reconstruction: no wonder they became cult heroes of the alternative scene for they genuinely offered something different, something almost classical compared to shallow hair metal, shock rock and the pop scene. Van Halen didn’t write songs about famine (Talk about the Passion), the futile waste of Reaganomics (pretty much all of Document) or oppression (Fall on Me).

They may have a reputation for making music that people who don’t like music like to listen to, but they made them listen to the barbed perfect plastic pop of Shiny Happy People and the frequently misunderstood ballads like Everybody Hurts period and Losing My Religion (surely the most popular song to feature a mandolin) which, whilst now somewhat irritating, at the time sounded like Stipe was drowning under the weight of what he was supposed to be. They then followed up those maudlin, couples coupling friendly, yet still staggering beautiful albums with fuzz rock and weird open American skyscapes; here was a band that made the music in their head not necessarily the music other people wanted to hear.

I saw them live twice. Once touring the quiet Up in Earl’s Court, where the concrete behemoth swallowed them whole. At one point Stipe paused and looked around. “Wow. We never thought this place would be so horrible.” On the Around the Sun tour they played Hyde Park and were barnstorming, pushing otherwise gentle songs with barbed lyrics to their very edge, Peter Buck’s guitar playing was like razor wire running through the grass. At the end Stipe, his face smeared with a blue paint eye mask that was dishevelling itself around his bald head like a tribal warrior from a lost island, a prophet speaking out from madness, said: “Thank you. We’re REM and this is what we do.” Quite, defy expectation – I’d thought the gig to be as shambolic as it had been years before, that the open sky would soak up the slow songs, but I was happily wrong.

That ability to remain timeless and to defy expectation is what keeps them relevant, if they do need to be any such thing. Over the past sixteen years or so they’ve sound-tracked my endless car journeys across dust speckled open highways and tightly wound Welsh hillsides, formal dinner and open house parties, foraged sexual encounters, relationships cracking apart into tears and bruises and were used as a yardstick to identify intelligent girls with good music taste in the late nineties, the more obscure their favourite track, all the better. They gave a sense, as a teenager when music is most important, that both anything is possible and the whole world is falling inside itself around you. They were a band whose records I would think I’ve listened to enough, that there is nothing else I can glean from them, and then I’ll idly put an album on and hear something that I never noticed before. Another glimpse of a mumbled half truth, another second of heartbreak or pump of adrenaline to a cord. They leave a fine body of work that I’ll listen to, probably, for the rest of my life, that there will always have a suitable song for the moment. Unlike Anthrax.

Five great REM songs:

Living Well is the Best Revenge: A spiky number from their penultimate album. I listened to this a lot at one point; exceptionally good life advice.

Nightswimming: A simple, elegant piano driven song with one of Stipe’s most plaintive vocals. The mourning of the song isn’t, as is often presumed for a lost love, but for the innocence and ease of youth slipping away.

It’s the End of the world as we know it (and I feel fine): My personal favourite. A marvellous celebration of impending eco-collapse and apocalypse; Stipe sings so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up with the scale and range of the disasters. The best moment is when, as he desperately reels off the portents of doom, he can’t quite believe that this is all really happening: ‘Right?’ he asks hoping that the answer will be in the negative. ‘Right’ affirm the band with a growl.

Pop Song ‘89: The whole of Green, their major label debut, was pristine pop covering up something much smarter and with greater depth than the facade. Pop Song ’89 was intended to kill of the impression that they needed to be more commercial to fulfil their potential; perhaps as Shiny Happy People followed shortly afterwards it wasn’t the killer blow, but it was a mortal wound well struck.

Don’t go back to Rockville: Deep South country-style plea for a girl to not abandon her lover, bassist Mike Mills, by heading back to the city. She goes, but this more than any other song is about where REM came from; it exemplifies their Georgian roots, letting them coil around the song in stranglehold that pleases rather than kills it. Whilst by no means their debut track, it’s hard to escape the feeling that everything else grew from here.

London's Burning

2011-08-11T20:45:00.002+01:00

There’s a scene near the beginning of Transmetropolitian, Warren Ellis’ and Darrick Robertson’s black sci-fi comedy about a campaigning journalist called Spider Jerusalem, when the City (it’s always just “the City” as though it was all and yet none of them) is ablaze with rioting. Spider stands on a rooftop above the crackling flames and the cranking of batons on heads and the dull thuds of rubber bullets being pumped against the young. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I feel a column coming on.’

High above the violence that, from memory my copy is somewhere in the West Midlands, Spider has helped cause through the arrogance of his moral right he sits and bashes out a vitriolic attack on both the perpetrators and the authorities. The smell of burning rubbish and cordite helps him find inspiration. Spider has to be on the inside in order to write.

Spider, fortunately, is only made up. This isn’t like that. I’m not like that.
But he City, this City, my City, and others have been ablaze and I can’t ignore it.

After all, I wrote it first.

On Thursday, my Kiwi friend almost got caught up in the shooting that sparked the whole fucking mess. Trying to cycle across the Tottenham viaduct she was turned back by police and sent the long way round, whilst in the distance men with guns surrounded the mini-cab with its doors open and a shape, motionless, on the floor by the rear wheel.

I was away for the weekend in deepest, darkest, wettest north Wales and so missed all the initial excitement until watching the news on Monday morning. Images of Tottenham’s burning on Saturday night cut through the pain in my legs. The looming totem of the Carpet store on the main drag raged golden orange until it was little but a husk.

As the horde rampaged and destroyed it was clearly dangerous and scary for those on the ground, but I also had a certain degree of respect for the rioters. The police appeared to have acted rashly or maybe inappropriately around Mark Duggan’s death.
The situation in Tottenham seemed deeply antagonistic as years of stop and search over-flowed into public resentment and a frustrated need to articulate complaints. Violence doesn’t necessarily work, but it certainly gets people’s attention. I watched the news, read some accounts online, but didn’t really give it much thought. After all, despite my pseudo-anarchistic leanings it on the other side of the City and already over. Nothing to do with me.

Until Monday night that is.

Monday night when the fires and mobs and broken glass and stolen property filled the City from Enfield in the north to burnt-out Croydon in the south, from eerie ghost filled Woolwich in the east to affluent Ealing in the west they came and they smashed and they looted.

But the thing is, I told you this would happen. Two years ago.

In my still as yet unpublished novel, You’ll never be Joe Strummer, the finale takes place against a London engulfed in riot. Starting up in Tottenham and Walthamstow anarchists and hard-line socialists clash with adherents to the nu-right and both lay into the police when they intervene. My characters find themselves drawn into the chaos, fire and violence unable to be anywhere else. Only in the trauma of a London tearing itself asunder will they find the answers they’ve been looking for: someone to blame, or maybe just themselves. The riot swells through most of the East End until the beltingly hot summer sun that’s scorched the City for months finally breaks into torrents of rain and everyone suddenly feels better, well enough to go home even.

‘How does it feel to have your novel coming true?’ my girlfriend texted on Monday morning. I jokingly replied that I had it already been published, rather than finding myself on a commuter train I’d have been on Newsnight.

But Monday was nothing like I’d imagined.

You see, the big difference between reality and fiction, and indeed between Monday and Saturday, was that one set of rioters were fighting for something they believed to be better and the other, well, who the fuck knows what they wanted.

‘Hey man, let’s get some watches,’ a youth gabbles on some Youtube footage filmed on Clapham High Street outside Debenhams, right before the department store was ransacked. And that’s the problem. Monday night wasn’t about anything bigger than individuals, it was about nicking trainers from Footlocker and laptops from Curries and burning down a family business in Croydon or an ethical supermarket in Ealing or trashing market stalls in Lewisham or tearing the Western Union on Mare Street, Hackney, trying to rip the TVs off the wall in Ladbrookes, torching buses in Peckham and destroying a Greggs in Deptford.

A Greggs for God’s sake. As though anyone is that desperate for pasties and sausage rolls.

Things got a little out of control. Mobs launched down Woolwich high street; a group attempted to raid a Michelin starred restaurant in Notting Hill, smashing their way through the window only to be seen off by kitchen staff armed with frying pans and knives; the Tescos close to flat six was attacked; video footage of the riots showed people helping a young man to his feet before stealing stuff out of his backpack; a man was shot and killed in Croydon, three in Birmingham.

My novel was intended to be a black comedy. This is not funny.

Rumour and counter-rumour spread like wildfire. Someone claimed that both the Venue nightclub in New Cross and the iconic Cat statue in Catford had been destroyed. Both were false. The Guardian labelled the Pembury Estate in Hackney as the epicentre and described barricades, Molotov cocktails and hurled bricks. Someone I know who lives there denies this. And yet the photos of torched cars are definitely in Clarence Street which runs down the side of the estate. Who should we believe? So much news is bound by the gaudy images of the most striking assaults and the ability of reporters to get there, but on the Twittersphere anything goes. You can tell the world false truths and they become real before your fingers have left the keyboard. I hear from someone not prone to exaggeration and who would be in the know that King’s A&E ward was closed due to a gang armed with knives roaming through. Surely this would make the news if it wasn’t being overshadowed by big, fucking fires everywhere, unless it’s all exaggeration, the need to be the centre of attention.

At one point with trouble in New Cross, Deptford, Peckham, Lewisham and Catford I felt utterly surrounded sirens screamed up the Brockley Rise. And yet, in amongst it all there was a very British humour: BrockleyCentral blog posting an update that said: ‘BBC news just described Lewisham as relatively central London. Every cloud has a silver lining.’

Tuesday was even stranger. Conversation and the internet were dominated by increasingly diverse and obscure rioting facts. In the afternoon the rumours started again. News of shops closing early saw people fleeing work to get back to areas otherwise unaffected. A woman sitting next to me on the 630 out of London Bridge talked rapidly into her mobile phone about all the bins in her street being on fire the night before and her co-worker who ran away from the office at lunchtime and refused to come back. A colleague of mine, another Brockley resident, spoke of hearing “intel” that something was going to explode in Lewisham.

Instead all was quiet. False information or people hitting the panic button? Who knows? I was supposed to meet a friend in New Cross for a drink, but everywhere was closed up. The shops, the takeaways, the pubs all were endless lines of steel shutters and hastily hammered in wooden panels giving it the feel of three in the morning yet with the glistening early evening sunshine it was more like an post-apocalypse movie. Still, nothing, in London at least, happened. The main excitement in the south-east was squatters taking over Ladbrookes in Deptford in the name of peace and the spooky sight of Milwall fans marching out of Eltham to defend the streets, whom by Wednesday night would themselves start pelting police with missiles and bottles as though disappointed at having no-one to fight.

London survived, but the violence spread across the country. To Manchester and Birmingham, to Liverpool and Leeds, Wolverhampton and West Bromich, Nottingham and Bristol. Gloucester even. Bloody Gloucester. I wonder whether the local police even knew where the riot gear was kept. This sort of thing is not supposed to happen in gentle, rural Cathedral towns.

But, as you know, this ain’t exactly normal.

Magistrate courts have been running a twenty-four hour service to deal with the hundreds arrested, as the trouble seems, at least temporarily, quelled. We need to think about why this happened. On the internet much of the focus seems to be for retribution and future control orders. These veer from the extreme (get the army, who are kind of busy you know, to gun the whole lot down) to the misguided: Do people genuinely not realise that Nottingham’s plans to evict any council residents shown to be involved, or the petition to suspend benefit payments will drive homeless and even poorer people to break the law. Desperation makes you do crazy things.

Yet, I can understand people’s anger. My liberal attitudes struggle to find sympathy for people aspiring to something so ultimately useless as an iPad. I believe in struggle, when necessary, to support an ideal. I don’t condone violence and looting because you fail to distinguish between television glamour lifestyles and real life.

Although, the everyman supporting character, Lucky, in You’ll never be Joe Strummer doesn’t understand the riot. He’s poor, he’s frustrated, but he can’t see the point in getting so het up over words.

Lucky, to be honest, is a bit of cipher. Not a real character, but a vessel for opinions. He’s a deliberate stereotype. But those involved earlier this week are impossible to stereotype. The image of young unemployed drop-out teenagers being to blame is false. Yes, an eleven year old girl was arrested for her part in the attempt to fire bomb a police station in Nottingham. Yes, there is something hugely sinister about trails of discarded sweet wrappers and crisp packets littering the destruction sites. Yes, the two girls who were interviewed by the BBC whilst drunk on stolen rose wine in Croydon at eight-thirty in the morning should have been in bed hours before. But amongst the first to be charged were, apparently, a thirty-one year old teacher and a forty-two year old resident of Brockley who worked for a homeless hostel and was arrested for breaking into Primark in Peckham. This isn’t an age thing.

I can appreciate that people are frustrated at being unemployed or on low wages, that the last vestiges of racism still clinging onto our institutions (although a lot of the rioters were white) are a disgrace, that being priced out of education crushes social mobility, that feeling as though you’re being deliberately kept at the bottom of the heap is an insult; I get all the socio-economical clichés you want to throw around. They’re all true. They all count. They’re part of this. They all help explain why the violence took place, but the direction of it, towards the acquisition of material goods, well I would suggest that a society that is grounded in crass commercialism and notional wealth, such as ours is, needs to look hard at itself.

But then again, what do I really know? I was raised comfortably enough, I went to University, I’m in full time employment and paid well enough to spend my evenings making shit up and passing judgement on people. Maybe I understand fiction people better because I get to control them. Maybe I was setting standards too high for people when I had them riot for a political ideal rather than just free stuff. Maybe the bleak dystopia I drew in You’ll never be Joe Strummer, sent shortly in the future where a selfish, materialistic yet economically shattered society is ruled by a flabby cheeked, floppy haired, principle-free berk called the Boss, I was correct to expect that rioting would come to the streets of London. I just never envisaged that the rationale would be so shamefully shallow and devoid of morals. Like the woman who took to the streets to berate rioters for not fighting for a cause and was ashamed to a Hackney person, I’m ashamed of Britain. Each and every one of us.

Westway to the world

2011-07-21T21:38:00.001+01:00

Oh, all right then. I’ll tell you what she said:

So, if you remember, we’d finally battled our way to renting a cute one bed Victorian conversion with its own garden and cellar in Brockley and, feeling rather pleased with life in general, when I turned up at her Maida Vale flat. It was a warm evening and I’d just finished draining a glass of water when she placed her hands on my biceps, looked into my eyes and said: ‘I need to talk to you. So, you know how we’ve found a flat? Well something’s coming up.’

In that moment disaster scenarios flew through my mind, but I needn’t have worried. Or at least not in that way.

‘I had an email from my neighbour earlier. She thinks she might need to leave London for a year and wondered if we wanted to rent her flat.’

Oh great, I thought. Now we have two.

‘How much for?’ I asked presuming that this would rule it out immediately. We’d already established that we could just about afford a tiny attic one-bed in Maida Vale. I guessed that we wouldn’t be able to afford a three bedroom mansion block lost to time.

‘Whatever we were planning on paying. Apparently.’

‘Wow. She could get double or even triple that for it.’

‘That’s what I said. I also explained that we’d just found somewhere so it was pretty unlikely, but that I’d mention it to you.’

I stood out on the balcony and looked at all the red brick prettiness as it lazily cascaded down into the trees, whispering amongst the city bustle.

‘You seem to be considering it,’ she said.

‘Mmm. It is lovely around here.’

‘I thought you’d want to stick with what we’ve already got.’

‘What do you want to do?’ I asked to divert the issue away from myself.

‘I don’t know,’ she smiled with indecision.

‘Can we have a look?’ I came back inside.

‘Ah. She’s house sitting in Wales.’

‘The things is, we need to decide this weekend else we’ll be into reference fees and all that.’

‘I know,’ she said as though to point out I was stating the obvious – which, of course, I was, but then it does help the audience to keep up.

‘And if we stall,’ I continued my useful exposition, ‘we’ll probably lose the Brockley flat.’

‘I know.’

‘What to do, what to do.’

‘It’s very pretty,’ she reassured. ‘And, well, it’s kind of the same as this one.’

It was quite a quandary. Essentially, the two sides – south east and west – were evenly matched. Any deposit we’d already paid would be balanced out by not paying reference fees. Any disadvantage would be countered by a positive: I’d need to buy a parking permit for Westminster, but could cycle to work easily. Or even walk. Every angle we analysed at had an equal reaction.

It was stale mate.

I decided to try and take a look for myself anyway. Moments later I hung off the edge of the back balcony, three storeys up, and peered into the bedroom, but I couldn’t really see beyond the sun’s reflection in the glass. After which it was a scuttle through the flat to scramble across the front balcony and check out the lounge. That was more satisfactory, I could see the extent of the room. Leering through the letterbox to see what the hall gave me a peculiar limited rectangular view.

‘Looks nice,’ I said almost disappointed that there hadn’t been some hideously vile piece of furniture that we’d be forced to life with. A flesh toned leatherette sofa, for example, or some amateur art etched into the walls depicting a faux Picasso nude at sunset. Her neighbour had taste, not exactly my taste, but nothing too gut wrenching. I could live with it.

Which was the whole point really. I would have to live with it for a whole year.

‘Unless she decides she doesn’t want to come back to London,’ a friend suggested, muddling the situation further, but let’s stick to what we knew.

It would only be for a year. We would have to live amongst her stuff. I would have to sell – or more likely freecycle - my own crappy furniture. That was no real great loss, but I’ve had some of it a long time. I’m kind of attached to it. In Brockley we’d be able to start settling down, getting on with our lives together, whilst Maida Vale felt a little like a postponement of that. It felt like putting off something that would be a pleasure. As though we were maybe a little nervous of ourselves.

And besides we’d have to do flats one through thirteen again.

And yet, and yet.

Maida Vale is cute. It’s central. It’s close to all the fun of London; it feels like you’re amongst it all, trapped in a Hugh Grant film, or, if you squinted and ignored the affluence, on the edge of a seventies punk record, or as though you might bump into ol’ Keith Talent from London Fields down the pub.

‘It’s kind of like living a fantasy,’ my girlfriend said as we wandered around Portobello market the next morning. ‘I’ve always known I’d never be able to live around here forever.’

‘But you grew up here,’ I pointed out. ‘Or down the road anyway.’

‘Yeah, but it was never like this. Now it’s all bankers and the filthy rich and Tories. Bah! It’s not people like you and me.’ She turned and smiled as the sunlight caught the reflection of her shades and turned the feathers in her hair fleetingly golden. ‘I think we’d be very happy in Brockley.’

She could just be saying that, my brain said. Why would she do that, I asked myself. Because she thinks it’s what you want and you’re just not saying it. Because she’s never missed the last train on a Tuesday and had to endure the slow meander of the nightbus through Elephant and Castle and Walworth and Camberwell and Peckham when it stops every ninety seconds as another pissed up idiot just like you gets on or off.

‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘another year of fantasy would be fantastic.’

And so it went, back and forth as we rushed around the city from conveniently central Maida Vale doing typical weekend things whilst trying to both think and talk about a decision and that we also partly wanted ignore and enjoy those moments that bring normality.

‘I think,’ I said ‘it’s so close that it just needs one of us to make a decision.’ I tried to pass the painful indecision onto her. I was tense with anxiety to the extent that in the middle of Saturday night I awoke screaming. I’d dreamt that someone was torturing me, slicing stripes of skin from my belly with a cheese knife.

‘Your eyes were wide with terror,’ she said the next day. ‘Yet you were still asleep. Or somewhere in-between. I didn’t know if you realised it was me.’

This was a thing. I have restless nights. My dreams are either vivid refuse to come at all; no sleep takes me away and after a while I give up and get up. I used to wander around the house, appearing spectre like over my parents, or so my Mum says. I don’t think she’d experienced that before. I felt as though we know everything about each other, and yet we don’t really. That’s all still to come.

That’s the fun part.

Sunday morning was sultry. The heat hung heavy over the city, our heads felt heavy after the night’s interruptions. We’d spent all weekend together and yet I felt as though I’d spent it with two flats. Later, we were supposed to be meeting a friend back to Hyde Park for another afternoon of music.

‘You go,’ she said, ‘I’ve a headache. I’ll come down later.’

I didn’t like to leave her, but perhaps the space between us would make it easier to think without trying to second guess the other. I sat on the grass outside the entrance to the festival site, waiting for my friend who was late as usual, and thought about texting our dilemma to people, or posting it on Facebook. Maybe a popular vote would make my choice for me.

‘Nah,’ I decided. It was too complicated to explain via text message because, essentially, it was about being confident in what we wanted. It was a choice we had to come to together else it would be the wrong one. I’d been wrong. One of us couldn’t tell the other what to do. That’s not how it was going to work.

Later still, when we’d met up again, we sat down in amongst the dusty crush and the paper cups of cider and the surrounding forests of legs feigned some privacy. I rested my head on her shoulder and murmured: ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘So have I,’ she replied.

We both smiled and that was that was needed. There was no need to say it. We just knew.

Bye-Bye Brockley

2011-07-18T21:35:00.002+01:00

Hold on a moment, let’s back up a bit.

I know. I know what you’re thinking: ‘You’ve been talking about moving out of SE4 for ages now, exploring a house share here, a studio flat there and – just recently - maybe even a full sized place somewhere else entirely, all to yourself, just get on with it.’ Thing is, it’s never been as simple as anywhere, anyhow. I’ve been in Brockely ten years now and whilst and I thought it was time to get out to actually do so felt like a wrench.

‘Why?’ asked Stu as we strolled through Hyde Park back in March. ‘I mean you really like it there. Why move?’ Especially, he didn’t add, if there’s going to be all this melodrama about it.

Because. Because. Because. Why change for the sake of change? Because I’m frightened that I’m frightened of change. Because I worry that the easy choice is to stay put when sometimes it’s better to do something not because it is easy, but because it is hard. A cliché, but they’re usually true.

‘What’s wrong?’ I suspect AS may have asked a couple of years ago as I disgruntled to be round her Maida Vale flat.

‘Been in West London too long,’ I grumbled. ‘Starting to break out in hives.’
That exact exchange probably didn’t happen, but it may as well have done. After all, my feelings about West London were pretty strong. My arrogant, inversed snobbery towards somewhere so much more affluent than the South East - and, indeed, me personally – was rife. The West was an area of which my main experiences were endless traffic jams on the A40, the Westfield shopping centre inching itself together over the years, plus coked up wankers in pizza restaurants riffing off old Jim Davidson routines and then trying to pick a fight when called on it. Okay, so there had been the odd enjoyable experience, CAMRA real festivals in Earl’s Court for example, but they were the exception.

Maida Vale, for no reason other than jealously and the near-fight with the “oo, she was Jewish princess, she was” routine obsessed, vodka dieting, misogamist prick back in 2004, came to be the epicentre of my disliked West London.

But then again, I didn’t really know it, did I? I had no real call to ever go there. I was a bit too quick to judge, a bit too keen on sweeping statements when I was a younger man and so as my friendship with AS grew and we visited to the area’s drinking establishments my resentment became somewhat diluted. In one of my more absurd property plans I even considered a tiny studio flat in the area, but that idea quickly faded and so I was still a little cynical of Madia Vale and its types when I stepped into my then-new girlfriend’s road a year ago.

‘Huh, pretty,’ I muttered to myself standing on the steps of the Victorian red brick mansion block with the huge bay windows and the balconies and the heavy deep wooden black door that would stop a bomb if it had to. The mansion blocks were built for wealthy young men to enjoy London life whilst still allowing room for a man servant. It was city living whilst still being on the right side of the city for country-bound parents and senior relatives to keep an eye on them. They were an outdated type in the twenty-first century, the sort of place Bertie Wooster would have lived. But then Bertie never actually came from the time he was supposed to. PG Wodehouse knew the world he wrote was a made up version of something that had passed all too fleetingly before the real world of the twentieth century got in the way.

Still, I never envisaged someone like me even existing on the edges of such a place, but then again, perhaps I’d never thought of myself in the right way. Perhaps I’d been swallowed by a pre-conception of who I should be.

I pressed the buzzer on the gold plate and tried to look as coolly out of place as possible.

As the weeks passed something I didn’t really ever expect to happen, happened: I actually started to rather like Maida Vale and its surrounding area. Possibly even all of West London. Well, okay, let’s not be silly: At least more of it than I ever expected. The pubs are great, especially the Warrington and the Prince Alfred. Kensal Green cemetery is joyously atmospheric. Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill delightfully green. Even Willesden bus garage is kind of cool. I like the restaurants, hell, even the pizza place is okay without that twonk being there too. It’s well connected. I could walk to work in about 45 minutes, if I so chose.

Okay, so all the things I was sceptical about are true: It is part of the West London fantasy island in the middle of the city, tied to the equally swanky Notting Hill, Chelsea and Kensington so that it sometimes feels as though it’s shunning everywhere and everyone else. Most of the population are bankers or the wives of bankers or the over indulged children of bankers still discovering themselves from the safe edges of the city before, inevitably, choosing their own banking-based career. Or old money of the sort that never needed to work, but actually those people make it sort of, well, nice, I guess.

Not particularly cool, and certainly not edgey, but nice in an easy to live there way (provided you can block out the occasional baying laugh). Life seems to drop down a gear, perhaps only because you sub-consciously know it won’t take an hour to get wherever it was you wanted to go or maybe because the expectation that whoever you’re meeting will wait for you. That probably rubbed off the guy next up in the bar. They’ll wait for him. He’s paying.

What can I say? It all got slightly Brideshead Revisited.

In early May we sat under the sunshine, amongst the ruins of a German castle. All around the Ruhr valley stretched its bleary Sunday morning way down from the hillock. There was no-one else around save for the view and I watched my reflection in her sunglasses which reflected her in mine.

‘Have you got a hang-over?’ she asked, letting go of my hand. ‘You feel clammy.’

‘No,’ I looked away for a moment and rubbed my palms together. She was right, they where slightly sticky. ‘I’m just nervous.’

‘Nervous? Why are you nervous?’

And so I asked her.

And then a few weeks later (because, sorry, but that’s how my brain works), I started thinking that’d there would be a blog in this. And that I’d call in Bye-Bye Brockley. That it would be a farewell because, I mean, I just presumed we’d move towards her. My girlfriend is West London through and through. She grew up there whilst I only ever moved to South East London. I’m a convert not a lifer. Her claim was greater than mine and besides, like I said, I’d been talking for years about moving ont. This was the perfect opportunity.

(Not that any of this was the reason I’d suggested we’d move in together, but it was a fortunate by-product. The reason was something around love and so-on which I won’t bore you with.)

What I hadn’t counted on was that Brockley had got its charming hooks into her too. ‘It’s so pretty and leafy and the parks are nice and Mr Lawrence’s is great,’ she enthused. ‘And we’ll get so much more for our money in the South-East. We might even get a garden!’

Non-Londoners might not appreciate that people will kill their children for an affordable garden in Zone 2. We nominally extend the search to include Peckham Rye and East Dulwich, but Brockley always seemed to be most likely to yield the best deal and she does like a bargain, does my girlfriend.

And so after all of the frustration of flats one through thirteen and the dozens we didn’t even see because people seemed happy to rent somewhere without even visiting the bloody place, we were excited to have finally found somewhere which perfectly matched our expectations.

‘It is a long way to cycle for work,’ my girlfriend said after we’d paid the deposit.

True, I thought, but her current route along the canals of Little Venice and through Hyde Park as it comes awake is kind of insanely quick and picturesque, isn’t it?

Still, everything seemed to be pretty much perfect until this happened:
She placed her hands on my biceps, looked into my eyes and said: ‘I need to talk to you. So, you know how we’ve found a flat? Well, something’s come up.’

To be continued…

Flats one through thirteen

2011-07-13T21:30:00.001+01:00

Flat one was an impromptu decision, just to get the ball rolling. We were seduced by its fancy eighties chic ways, the built in wine cooler and espresso maker, the dark grey tiles of the wet room. Thing was, it wasn’t quite honest. I wasn’t the only one looking round it and as the woman ooed and aaeh in her partner’s ear I marvelled at how squished I felt. The door to the lounge didn’t even shut properly because of the sofa. Besides it wasn’t really where it said it was, their interpretation of East Dulwich was generous that far down towards Forest Hill. A long way from anywhere, really. Or anywhere anyone would want to go. After I donked my head on the ceiling for the fourth time I grumpily excused myself thus preventing a bidding war, in which less than half the people present wanted to participate in. Off I trudged, down the length of Barry Road and across the open Peckham Rye, as the hefty Thursday sun belted down on my neck, my briefcase was slung across my shoulder and a chaffing Sainsbury’s bag containing trainers and clothes from a couple of days back cut into my fingers. As I struggled with the weight, I realised that soon I wouldn’t be spending so much time collecting my wardrobe from around the city. This plan had so many unexpected benefits.

Flat two was the first one we looked at together, the first one we took seriously, but it didn’t light up for either of us. The view of the Rye was pretty enough on such a sunny morning, but maybe it was the shiny greyness of the estate agent’s shirt which shimmered as he moved in that jerky-static, check-Cockney, barrow boy way, or maybe it was the strange creatures in the floor to ceiling cage, or the lycra wearing owners doing aerobics in the lounge whilst we tried to gauge how it would look with all our stuff instead of theirs, or maybe even the soft brown leather bed, but something, whatever, didn’t feel quite right.

Flat three was never going to work. It was always too cheap, down the Lewisham end of Wickham Road, but if the first two had been up at the top end of what we could afford this was to check out what was on offer down the bottom. A fridge freezer in the lounge, a bedroom too small for a double-bed and panes of glass that felt loose in their frames was the answer.

Flat four probably would have been great. It was kind of odd, but in a good way up on Tressillian Road. Down in the basement, it had a country cottage style unfashionable kitchen of open units and no storage, a spare room underneath the steps up to the rest of the building, a dark oak heavy wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom, a lush shared garden and dodgy wall paper in a lounge filled with two crappy sofas. Thing was, it was just me again. My girlfriend was in France with work, soaking up the sun on the glittering cote d’azur and I should never have gone, but I’ve always been bad at ignoring problems. I just want to sort things out. So, I went and liked it, but not enough to be certain. I pleaded with the Polish agent and he promised to hold it until she got back at the weekend. The next day he let it to someone else, the shit. Ah well, it was kind gloomy and ever so slightly damp.

Flat five would have killed us. ‘What you have to remember,’ trilled the agent shrilly as she prepped us in the street, ‘is that this flat is really Victorian, yeah? I mean, when I first saw it, I was like, oh yeah, this must be how them Victorians really lived.’ Uh-huh, I thought and in we went. ‘The landlord’s already said he’ll fix that,’ she pointed out as my foot almost plunged through the broken floorboards and into the foundations. The lounge was an okay size, but in a tired shape. Where once would have been a beautiful Victorian fireplace, someone had ripped the whole mantelpiece out and replaced it with a gas fire coloured that unique seventies faded olive green. Attached to this ugly monstrosity was a safety notice: ‘Condemned!’ it read. ‘Do not use. Danger of death!’ ‘That’s not very reassuring,’ I said. ‘Is that going to be fixed?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. He hasn’t mentioned it.’ We moved into the hall. ‘Anyway, it’s got lots of storage.’ She flung the doors open and inside the cupboard two planks of MDF sagged in a sad grimace back at us. The so-called study, which felt damp even on a hot Saturday afternoon, was so small I could stand in the middle and touch every wall without stretching. The doorknob for the bathroom came off in my girlfriend’s hand. Whilst she found herself forced to clamber into the bath in order to close the door I began to wonder what on earth I was playing at. ‘So, I’ve found this place on Oglander Road in East Dulwich,’ I’d explained as I met her at the bus stop from the airport. ‘It sounds great.’ But the garden was a mess. There was a shed, but clearly not for much longer for when I tapped the wall it collapsed inwards. ‘What you have to remember,’ the estate agent piped up, ‘is that if you were buying this place it’d make a great investment. It’s got loads of potential.’ ‘But I’m renting it.’ ‘It’s really Victorian,’ she tried optimistically and I worried that my girlfriend would be questioning what she was getting herself into with South East London.

Flat six came close. Hinckley Road was nestled between Peckham and East Dulwich to give the best of both and hide from the worst of the yummy mummies or the relentless bass from growling cars. Plus it was just up from the Gowlett. The last time I’d been there it’d been a fantastic pub. It was thrashing it down with rain and unusually dark when we arrived. The agent was late and then bumblingly incompetent, like he’d he was channelling the ghost of Charles Hawtrey, only without the Carry On sexual innuendo. First he tried to take us into the wrong flat, one where a child was home alone, and then he forgot every detail about the place we had come to see, flicking through a sheaf of damp notes held together by string. Even so, it was close. It really was. The kitchen was great, the bathroom pretty good and the patio kind of cute, if you like crazy paving which I don’t mind, but she did. Maybe if we’d been less soggy, maybe if the cellar hadn’t been damp, maybe if the lounge had been square rather than having the corner cut out of it by the staircase upstairs, maybe if you’d been actually able to get in and out of a bed without somersaulting over each other, maybe if the Gowlett hadn’t seemed to have gone downhill so badly we’d have taken it. Perhaps it was because it was raining. We went back a couple of days later when, despite lovely sunshine all through the afternoon, the rains were pelting down again. ‘You’ve three minutes,’ the agent said as the next woman huddled in the shelter of the doorway across the way. We couldn’t be pushed into a decision, it just didn’t feel right. I wonder if she took it. I wonder if she was alone and if not didn’t she mind falling over your dearest at every turn.

And this isn’t even counting all the places that were gone before we even saw them or never really there in the first place. The internet was supposed to make this sort of thing easier, but all it does is provide endless information overload that breaks your heart and pisses you off twenty times a day.

Flat seven was just too sad, despite the proximity of Hilly Fields. It smelt of cigarettes and tears. The big woman who opened the door wasn’t even dressed and looked barely conscious. She sat on the edge of the bed staring down at the hands in her lap as we looked around and intruded amongst the dirty wine glasses and empty bottles in the kitchen, the slopped red stain on the lounge floor and the photographs on every surface of her with a smiling man in her arms of whom there was no trace.

Flat eight cropped up at the time when we were beginning to think about lowering our standards. It was a Sunday evening and it wasn’t on any of the property website as yet. It had just appeared on the Polish agent’s website. It looked perfect. It looked light and smartly designed, modern without catering for twats. It had room for an office where I could write, selfish demanding bugger that I am. It had access to a garden. ‘I want it, ‘ I thought and despite it being late on a Sunday rang the Polish agent, but the dial tone told me he was out of the country. Nine in the morning and I rang his office. And again. And again until I got to speak to someone. And again when the right person didn’t call me back. ‘I’ll need to speak with the tenants before we can go round, but you’re the first person to call for this one,’ he reassured me. I called him four more times when he didn’t call back. This continued all Monday and Tuesday as I braced myself to sneakily disappear from work for an hour or so. All the while there was a growing weight of anticipation snagging down around my neck distracting myself from everything other than how we’d arrange the furniture to make the best use of the space. I felt permanently poised until eventually he said: ‘You sound pretty keen so we can get you in first, how about tomorrow morning?’ So I took a half day off work, even though my girlfriend had meetings she couldn’t get out of. ‘If it’s like the pictures, just go for it,’ she told me. In the morning I paced in anticipation willing the time to skip past. The flat was exactly like the pictures, the only drawback being that the garden wasn’t secure for bike storage and, well maybe, its white coolness was just a touch clinically stale. Anyway, I went for it. The Polish agent, who was back by now, took some details and a holding deposit. I texted my girlfriend as I waited at the train station to go to work. We had a home. ‘Hello David,’ said the Polish agent ten minutes later whilst I changed at London Bridge. ‘Um, I’ve spoken to the landlady and, well, there’s a problem.’ ‘What?’ I felt my heart escape. ‘She doesn’t really want to rent the flat. She wants to sell it.’ ‘What?’ I repeated not able to understand what he was telling me. ‘You can rent it for a while, but people will be coming round to look at buying it. I thought I’d let you know as you said you wanted a long-term rent.’ ‘Cunt!’ I shouted into the air after he’d hung up and I kicked an advertising hoarding on the platform. Then I kicked it a few more times because a pain in my foot was somehow better than the ache of frustration and disappointment.

Flat nine was kind of pointless. My girlfriend was still upset about missing out on number eight and so didn’t come. I didn’t know why I was going, perhaps just to reassure myself there was stuff out there we could disregard. That we weren’t desperate yet. Still, three bedrooms on Wickham Road for that price was just too cheap. We didn’t even need that much space. It was as skanky as expected. The lounge was nice enough, but the rest needed a major refurbishment and the agent seemed to think he was a BMW driving Fonz. ‘Eeeeeyyyy,’ he greeted me, waggling his thumbs upright. One of the bedrooms was so narrow that the single bed touched three walls and the edge of the open door. The other room slipped underneath the bare concrete outline of the stairs up to the front door. On every surface were old cameras, in cabinets, hanging from the ceiling, on the cistern of the toilet, suspended from the kitchen extractor fan. People are strange, I thought to myself as I didn’t even bother to pretend to be interested.

Flat ten was back in East Dulwich on Crystal Palace Road. It sounded nice as my girlfriend rang through the details. A garden, one bedroom and a landing where I could fit a desk to write, but a little drafty from the open chimney. Problem was, I was a hundred miles north on a canal barge for Jamie’s stag do. I tried to picture the layout she described as I clamped the phone to my ear, struggling to ignore the babble of excited thirty-something men let out. ‘What do you think?’ I asked. ‘I’m not sure,’ she replied honestly. ‘It’s okay, I suppose.’ ‘Let’s go for it,’ I replied bombastically, but by that time I’d already had a couple of beers and was perhaps being a little impetuous. ‘Good news?’ asked Google-Steve whom I’d been boring with our struggle all the way up from London the night before. ‘Yeah,’ I nodded enthusiastically, but already had doubts at my own eagerness. After all it was for at least a year. ‘I think we might have a flat.’ My mobile rang. ‘It’s gone,’ she sighed. ‘The person after me took it straight away.’ Phew, I thought.

Flat eleven my girlfriend saw moments after flat ten and although apparently massive and light, it was furnished and in a way which, whilst perfectly nice, just wasn’t for us. Tuh. I wondered if were being too fussy. ‘We’ve plenty of time,’ she said, but it was slipping away from us.

Flat twelve came with its own cats.

Flat thirteen just kind of felt right. It looked okay on the pictures, a one bed with a dining room which could be partly used as an office, a massive garden led out to by French windows from the bedroom. It only looked okay online, not amazing, but I had a good feeling about it. It felt a little blank, like we could make it something of our own. Thanks to Arcade Fire playing Hyde Park in the afternoon we both had the next day off. The agent was something of a geezer: ‘Cor, I tell you, this woman coming at six o’clock she said don’t let no-one else take it! I want it! Still if you’re available, then you’re in first. Them’s the rules.’ Once inside it felt even better. We went downstairs to explore the enormous cellar and afterwards as the agent faffed with the lights we slipped into the lounge and I said: ‘What do you think?’ She nodded and then added: ‘I mean that hideous sofa goes, but otherwise, yeah.’ ‘So,’ said geezer who seemed alright for an estate agent (although may have just been because we took his flat), ‘what you reckon?’

We took it.

By the time we’d sorted out the holding deposit we were running late, but that was okay. The sun was shining, except for when it wasn’t, and the music played and I felt elated. We had a home, after all the hours of trawling the internet at risk from the IT department’s wrath and my mobile chirruping out the Dexy’s Midnight Runners all through the afternoons, after all the disappointment and the feeling of futility as we rang to enquire about yet another place that was too nice to be still available, after all that we finally had a lovely place of our own. ‘We can grow vegetables in the garden,’ I cooed into her ear, no doubt nauseatingly for anyone who overheard.

The next day I remained irritatingly chuffed for myself until at around seven-thirty in the evening I arrived at my girlfriend’s Maida Vale flat, having cancelled all our viewings for the following morning and looking forward to a weekend of not obsessing about where we might or might not be living in a few week’s time. In the kitchen I downed a glass of water and then she placed her hands on my biceps, looked into my eyes and said: ‘I need to talk to you. So, you know how we’ve found a flat? Well, something’s come up.’

To be continued…

Wet (an epilogue).

2011-04-19T21:48:00.003+01:00

Are you sitting comfortably? Then, I’ll begin.

That was how, in my head, I intended to start this blog. I wanted to tell you a story. I would have told you about the man with sand beneath his feet who became lost in the desert and bested the temptation of the beast. It’s an old one. You’ve probably heard it before. I would talk about resistance and possibly even a bit of redemption. I had it all mapped out from back in early March; notes scrawled across an A3 sheet of paper folded and crossed next to my keyboard. There’s no detail, just themes and notes. Next to week six it says “Why does everyone think Lent finishes at Easter? Doctrine? Conclude, summarise – the future. Is there ever an ending? Or does it always come later than we think?’

As I sat down to write out the final broadcast in this series I was no longer sure what the tale I’ve been telling is.

There was no final redemption. I never fell to my knees on the road to Damascus. There was no narrative arc to conclude. This is just about life, just random gatherings of useless knowledge and half remembered late nights.

Last weekend was my Grandpa’s ninetieth birthday. A phenomenal milestone and so I visited my family, went back to the places I’d been telling you about. Perhaps I hadn’t fully thought things through when I pressed ‘post’ last Thursday for one of the first things I was asked was: ‘How much of it was true?’

I shirked the question, answered without saying anything mainly because I wanted to avoid the conversation, but perhaps it deserves a response: All of it.

And none of it.

As I said right at the start, I don’t have - and never have had - a problem with alcohol. This is about why such a thing could have been possible.

I’ve presented you with snapshots. I’ve given you glimpses into ten years. A long time. Time more than enough for low and high moments. I don’t consistently drink too much, but I have done. Who hasn’t? I have never drunk for extended periods of time quantities of alcohol that would make you liver ache just reading about them. And yet, once, once upon a time I took pride in my capacity for drink. I was secretly pleased that I was capable of out drinking people as though it were…
As though it was what? I’m not sure. Some twisted sense of masculinity? No.
Not that.

More like not having grown up; like I was stuck at fifteen.

There was never any reason for it. I wasn’t depressed or bored or lonely. It certainly wasn’t because I thought it would make me more creative. I am not that naive. I’ve read things written after I have had a drink. They’re rubbish.

I thought I was blank.

‘So, why did you stop?’ my girlfriend asked.

I glanced at her and then back at the road. ‘What do you mean?’

‘If you started because you’d just arrived in London and had enough money,’ opportunity and means, ‘why did you stop?’

The traffic soared through the Paddington sky, arcing across the concrete flyover underneath the glittering sun.

After a while I said: ‘I don’t know.’

I’d never thought to ask myself that question. It just had. A couple of years ago, after a heavy night at a wedding, I had a pint with some friends at a lunch. Everyone else was on soft drinks. The fact I was drinking was remarked upon. It was a point of humour, as though it were inevitable that I would have started up again. It was only a pint, I thought, but I also felt slightly embarrassed. Did everyone else see something that I didn’t? It reminded me of a guy I met on a stag do, a man about ten, fifteen years old than me. We’d been fairly drunk the first night and as everyone else struggled their fried breakfasts down and grudgingly clambering into a middle bus that tilted around country lanes as though tempting our stomachs to evacuate, he cracked open a can of lager.

‘I’m like a machine,’ he joked, but his skin was blotched and his hair flayed, his paunch sagged and his eyes were hollow. He was alone.

I didn’t want to be him.

But remember, this is only a story. The epilogue makes no sense without all the words that precede it.

There were plenty of drunken writers I never got around to mentioning. Jack Kerouac left speed for booze as he became older, as he slowed down and his skin took on an increasingly yellowed hue until early one morning, sipping whisky and rye, his stomach haemorrhaged and he bled to death, vomiting great globules of salty blood up as he went.

Jack London once wrote: "I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink." By 1916, aged forty, London was treating his various painful ailments, dysentery, uremia, scurvy and the rest all aggravated by the drinking, with morphine when he appeared to decide that enough ache had passed. He let himself slip away on the front porch of his ranch, never to wake again.

Not everyone died young. Dorothy Parker made it to her seventies. Jean Rhys drank herself to bitterness but still preserved out of bloody mindedness to eighty-eight.
Then there’s the bizarre: Edgar Allen Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore wearing another man’s clothes and delirious when he collapsed and died; although all records have been lost he is believed to have been drunk beyond belief.

John Cheever; Eugene O’Neill; Anne Sexton; James Joyce; Hunter S Thompson; Tennessee Williams; Truman Capote and a thousand lost faces at the bar besides yet their stories are alien to me; more extreme than anything I can remember.

Why do writers drink so heavily? Stupidly, my page of notes suggests that I might be able to answer this question. Whilst there’s a little bit of me that is tempted to go with Robert Stone’s suggestion that it is to bring you down from the euphoria of words transcending the page they’ve been cast upon it would be ridiculous to suggest that there was a single reason. Or indeed that, proportionately, writers drink any heavier or deeply that any other cross-section of society. Maybe they have more demons to carry, but that’s a different question. That’s asking why they write in the first place; why they feel the need to demand that people listen to what they have to say.

Whatever the tortured artist is looking for inside the solace of an empty head, it isn’t inspiration. Or at least not the ability to convert inspiration into words. Wherever stories come from, it isn’t inside a deep drunk.

Maybe, though, it is to enable them to disassociate themselves from the norm.

Despite what the Daily Mail would have you believe, heavy drinking is not a keystone of society. Drinking is, yes, but long lasting, thorough spirit drinking at nine in the morning is still mainly socially unacceptable. It puts the drunk writer on the outside, looking in. They have been ejected out into the cold which makes it easier to look on everyone else with jealousy, with scorn, with envy, with a sense of the absurd. Maybe that’s it, maybe Hemmingway and Fitzgerald and Chandler and Greene and everyone else drank because it helped them to pass judgement.

Maybe that’s what I did too, you ask.

Sort of. Maybe. Maybe not.

I wonder if it was just that I wasn’t sure who I was yet. I’ve always had a good and happy life and yet it often felt a little empty, as though devoid of purpose. My own internal narrative lacked voice and direction. Perhaps it made me a little more interesting to myself. I think that maybe I bored me. I wanted a mythology without doing anything and so I replaced doing with dreaming and occasionally with drinking.

This story has no narrative and so has no ending because it has no true conflict. Giving up drinking for forty days wasn’t hard. Possibly giving up that representation of me (even if these days only the gremlin that walks my past inside my head sees it) was a little harder, but it was fun to confound people’s expectations.

I missed the social aspects. I missed the camaraderie for the Boy-John’s stag-do. I missed not being able to toast my Grandpa with anything other than lemonade. I missed sharing a bottle of wine with my girlfriend. This culture, this land, I love so is built of liquid foundations, but much to my surprise I didn’t actually miss the drinking.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote ‘first you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink and then the drink takes you.’ Maybe, a while ago, the drink was insisting it was its round, but I left it to its own devices in some late night bar somewhere and went home to bed. Or so I hope. I might be wrong. Perhaps Lent hasn’t finished after all. Perhaps the true ending comes later. Perhaps that’s how life really works; the ending isn’t on the last page but somewhere in the blankness at the back.

No.

I am not a machine. I won’t be alone and broken. I know which I want to do. I am starting to know who I am.

At the weekend, I bought some bottles of beer including the gorgeous tangy delight that is the Badger Brewery’s spring ale, Hopping Hare. It sits on my kitchen table. The dipping sunlight strokes the bottle; the golden contents sparkle. It is unseasonably hot. A glass is placed next to it. I sit in the chair and look. I think about the cap fitch-popping under my fingers, about the glugging of the refreshing drink filling the glass, about the anticipation and the glorious thrill as it brushes over my lips.

I get up.

I put the kettle on.

Not tonight. Another time.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The end.

Decision

2011-04-14T21:48:00.003+01:00

Dylan sighed, a well of weariness drawn up from deep inside, pulled from far away back home. He was tired. Tired and sick. Tired and sick and unable to sleep. And drunk. Most of all, Dylan was darkly drunk. He let his lids sink and gently massaged his temple. Breath escape his ragged lungs and then, whilst the release had been calm, the attempt to snatch air back hacked and thracked his whole body. Stifling his coughs, Dyan indicated at his empty glass on the bar’s counter. The barman nodded and duly obliged to pour a slug of whisky.

Plagued by looming insolvency and the probable collapse of his marriage - poor Caitlin lost to the winds of her fancy and equally swallowed up by the drink - Dylan had readily accepted the lecture tour of America. A thousands pounds a week would solve his money problems, would leave him free from work and blissful in the arms of his musing, but America wasn’t suiting him. He’d enjoyed himself when he’d last visited. Or so he imagined. He couldn’t quite remember. They told him that he felt up the movie starlet and urinated in Charlie Chaplin’s pot plant, the sort of ego deflation that was within his gift to deliver. But this time, in New York, the air was laden with smog; worse even than London. A dank, smouldering cloud that penetrated life and moodily sagged.

Not that he truly felt any better in Wales. Dylan rarely felt well anymore. Instead he felt dragged down, weighed on by the burden of the need for words. The blackouts were almost a release. A gift of a few moments away from the throb inside, in his gut.

He necked the whisky. It glided down with ease to join the others.

The barman tipped the bottle. Dylan nodded. Amber honeyed peace sloshed in the glass.

Unable to sleep, Dylan had left his hotel and prowled his way through Chelsea to the bar. Dylan liked to drink in the same places. He enjoyed the nod of recognition, the slight apprehension over what he might do, who he might speak with, what he might offend. Dylan enjoyed his reputation. He’d carefully built up the myth of a drinker. He was a poet whose words bought the truth that beer and whisky cleared the mind for. Life was nothing save an interlinked mess of dreary beauty but for a drink, ah a drink and the people one found at the bottom of the glass, made it worthwhile. Yet there was no-one that night. There was just Dylan and New York, cold and distant, the murmur around the bar, whisky and the memories of words that might have been.

Should he have another? He tried to count how many he’d already had and to work out whether it would make any difference the following day. He felt mildly sick, but then booze increasingly made him nauseous. And whilst he wondered, he pointed at the empty glass and it was duly topped up; his semblance of a choice in the matter shattered by his body acting on its own accord, broken by reality.

There was no choice. No matter how much he pretended otherwise, no matter how much he longed to retain control, he would drink either until he was broke and could charm no-one to join him or he blacked out.

Choice was but an illusion caused by wants.

Later Dylan stumbled home through the smogged streets of Chelsea. He didn’t pause, he didn’t clutch drunkenly at lampposts, Dylan was used to walking whilst drunk and he adapted his step to accept his stagger. Arriving in the red bricked entrance of the Chelsea Hotel, he nodded at the receptionist with a sly yet troubled grin.
‘I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies,’ he proudly proclaimed to no-one in particular. He paused and rubbed his temple as though easing thoughts of nothing out. ‘I think that’s a record.’

He stumbled up the stairs to his room not realising that when he lay down in the cool crashing forgiveness of the sheets he would never rise again. Even the hacking cough had rescinded, but the deep blue horror of his lungs reached out to his heart and embraced it. Sometime in his slumber Dylan slipped into a coma.

There he lay, at peace at last, in amongst the future ghosts of the Chelsea hotel. The rooms where Charles Jackson had chugged down sufficient pills to never wake from his final Lost Weekend; where Kerouac had battered out On The Road on a single endless tube of writing paper; where Dylan’s namesake Bob would compose his early calls to arms and sorrowful laments of love lost; where Andy’s glamour and vice would be filmed for fleeting fame; where Jimi and Janis and gravely Tom and Dee Dee and Johnny Thunders and Rufus before he got straight would all lose a sliver of their souls; where Sid would murder Nancy in his drugged oblivion, where in the twenty-first century Joseph O’Neil would compose a novel of loneliness and isolation, of being lost in a city that belongs to the world. Dylan’s breath rattled and rolled, cracking amongst his dreamless sleep. His soul drifted into the walls, the foundations, the plaster and the time.

Eventually a doctor arrived, sent him to hospital and incorrectly administered too much morphine and that was poor Dylan gone. Gone to the wind of the world.

“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

-And Death Shall Have No Dominion by Dylan Thomas.

Years later, Caitlin would write, as though we didn’t know, “ours was a drink story not a love story, just like millions of others.”

Just like millions of others? How despairing Dylan would have found all his efforts to be for naught.

When I first came to London, ten years ago this summer, I was a young man suddenly gifted a disposable income. Unexpectedly finding myself flush for cash after years of penniless studenthood and poorly paid bar work, I wasn’t, initially, interested in saving for anything. After all, what did I have to save up for? I had a rented flat I could afford and property ownership seemed a distant hassle. I had a patched together car. My interests were records, books and, well, going to the pub.

So I did. Lots.

The company I worked for mythologised drunken editorial staff. It actively encouraged lunchtime boozer visits with managers just as effortlessly tired as the rest of us. I quickly became accustomed to journalists turning up at lunch time having stopped off for a morning stiffner and that feeling of sinking weightlessness as the only lunch I’d had was two pints of lager. Friday afternoons were a void. I stumbled back to my desk at about three-thirty and tried not to screw up.
But I was young and didn’t know any better. Besides it was what everyone else did.

By the Christmas of that first year I deemed it appropriate behaviour to turn up to a dinner party with a four pack, two bottles of wine and a half bottle of brandy, largely for my own consumption. The resulting walk home saw me, so I’m told, nearly fall head first under the wheels of a taxi followed by an empty head and a flooded stomach the morning after. This three day hang-over did lead me to calm down somewhat, but slowly over the years it snuck back up.

The Boy John had his stag do right in the middle of Lent. That was okay. It was a countryside weekend away, not one swamped in drink and the typical distractions of male bravado around girls and fights and sights. I offered to make life easier and drive everyone.

As we walked away from the racecourse, the others were slightly flushed from midday drinking, but my head clean and clear. I watched the throngs of staggering bodies we passed. The red-stung face of the young man in his shiny grey court suit being held back by his mate as he raged at the world around, filled with anger for every living injustice; the orange skinned over-exposed girl tottering on implausibly high heels as she tried to navigate the kerb; the older guy with his head resting on his arms supported by a handy wall at the end of someone’s drive, the puddle of sick over his shiny shoes; the lad groaning under the weight of his girlfriend in his arms, who berated him in slurred words as he carried her from the melee. I was never like that. I just used to sit quietly, drink and turn off.

Time eased by. I started to hang around the less salubrious pubs in South-East London, chatting merrily to people with speckled red faces and faded love and hate tattoos on their knuckles. But still, it didn’t feel any different to all those who went and passed out on a Saturday night. At a party in Peterborough I remember sitting under the barbecue sky and an Australian girl with a bottle of whisky hanging out her dungarees asked us why weren’t getting drunk.

‘I don’t think,’ I replied, ‘there’s any real danger of us missing out.’ I knew I’d get there, I had ample ale to get through and fancied poaching some of her scotch, but I couldn’t see what the hurry was.

In many ways I almost preferred drinking alone, even occasionally leaving a work drinks early to go home, sit and watch TV and chug back cans of lager and a couple of hard measures. It wasn’t because I preferred my own company, but simply because sometimes it was easier that way. I didn’t need to impatiently wait for someone else to finish their drink and get a round in, or be bought a drink by me so that I wasn’t at the bar just for myself.

At the time I lived with my then-girlfriend, but we were never permanently entwined. She had a tendency to work into the early hours of the morning leaving me to my own devices. It wasn’t that hard to sneak the additional recycling out the flat and pretend to have had less than I had.

I started to take whisky to bed with me. Not every night, but often enough. A large glass of scotch balanced on my chest as I lay and read words in books I wouldn’t be able to remember the next day and when I’d finished, I would hide the glass somewhere underneath the bed. Down amongst the sleeping bags and the places she wouldn’t go.

Friends began to cut back, to be able to enjoy a couple of drinks and then call it a night. They claimed that any more and they would be incapacitated the following day. I nodded and pretended to be the same, but really I couldn’t understand it. If anything my tolerance appeared to be growing stronger and stronger. For a while my whisky habit became something like a bottle a week. Plus beer and wine and other assorted spirits. I would deliberately arrive early to meet friends and nip into a different pub around the corner for a solitary pint. I would try to find a late night bar still open on the way home and miss the last train in favour of the night bus. Failing that I’d acquire a can for the journey somewhere and still take a nightcap once finally home.

At some point I started drinking things I’d never touched before. Cider and vodka, for example. Not necessarily the nice stuff either. The cheap and the strong, those that typically have little purpose beyond being lost. I stopped buying single malt scotch and switched to blends, partially out of sheer financial necessity, but also because it felt wrong to drink and without true appreciation.

And in the mornings, I’d awaken in the chair, in a bathtub, on a sofa, somewhere across town from home, somewhere I had to quietly slip out from letting the door close on the people I just met. Locking away the night for another day.
Somewhere around this time I stopped getting hang-overs. Which seems somewhat weird, but it’s true. No matter how much I drank, I would feel, if not fantastic, then at least okay the morning after. A bit tired, somewhat irritable, but nothing a walk in the fresh air and several strong coffees wouldn’t fix. I tended to sag slightly in the mid-afternoon, but if there was no debilitating, gut wrenching God-awful pain then what was to stop me?

Is any of this true? Or am I self-mythologising too? Was it habit, boredom or frustration? Maybe all three, maybe none. Maybe I’m picking out infrequent incidents in a ten year period.

It was all such a long time ago, why am I even telling you all this? Who am I confessing my sins to? Who am I saying sorry to?

Ray didn’t need to open his eyes. He could smell where he was. Again. The stench of cleanliness burned. He’d hoped for a moment, it that brief pause between the disturbed sober slumber and being fully awake, that he had dreamt the two previous days.

But that was a pointless wish, for Ray hadn’t dreamt in years. His sleep, when it finally came, was deep and black and undisturbed except by the aches.

He really was back in hospital. His stomach lining had loosened again and as he’d vomited there’d been blood and a slight stink of faeces. Someone more coherent had decided to call for help and so there he was again. On the ward. The fourth time in under a year. They didn’t want him there. They weren’t interested in those who wouldn’t try. He didn’t want to be there either. He just wanted to be left alone.

He was stuck. They all were. Ray, the failing writer, and all his drinking chums with nowhere to go. The guy to his right rolled under the sheets and scratched at his bare flesh as though something wriggled under the skin. The man diagonally opposite had drunk a bottle of vodka every day for twelve years and had given up too late to save his liver. It had stopped functioning leaving him prone to swelling with fluid; unable to process waste his gut had ballooned out to the size of a beer barrel with his belly button sharply protruding like a the tap to draw off a beautifully golden fizzing beer, all hoppy and bliss. The man down the far end of the ward needed an operation to remove a weeping abscess on his bladder and who liked to drink thirteen bottles of cooking sherry a day. The bed to Ray’s left was empty, the occupant from the day before was barely an indent in the sheets as though he’d never been there.

They were all part of the club; everyone had a drink of choice and sometimes they even had a reason to drink. But more often they didn’t. More often to drink was their reason. No excuse was offered. Telling the truth, for once, they would shrug and admit that it was just because. Because there was no choice.

Ray closed his eyes again. The problem with hospital was that there was so little to do. At least at the rehab out clinic there was structure, meals to be made, tasks to be done, games of cards and chess to be played, a routine to exist by. In the hospital there was just boredom. Boredom made Ray want.

No. That was a lie.

Life made Ray want.

He tried to think of a single line, a phrase to cut to the heart of where he was. Something that described the futility and resigned acceptance of hospital stays as a part of the drinker’s life. He would have been able to do so once. Once when he wrote. He missed writing, but he’d had to give it up. It took up too much time. It got in the way of his fulltime drinking.

One of the men eeked his way past Ray’s bed, his hospital gown flapping open at the back to reveal his wart covered behind. Every few steps he giggled and raised the front to expose his shrunken and wrinkled genitals. His movements were slow and ached, fragile as though he might shatter. Not that he would have cared. Yet sufficient force to self-shatter was clearly beyond his wasted muscle. He looked as though he’d been collecting his pension for ten years. The nurse had said he was forty-three.

The bed to Ray’s left was still empty.

Ray’s stories had been collected the year before. Written in the gaps between various blue collar jobs in hospitals and stores and wherever to get by and the teaching of writing to others and the far more serious business of getting wasted, Ray had been pleased that it had been released. And yet it wasn’t enough. He could do better; he just needed the right amount of whisky to find the sweet spot between drunkenness and sobriety to have the courage to reveal life.

He sighed quietly to himself and craved a cigarette. A cigarette and a drink. He wished the pretty nurse would come round and arrange his pillows, just to give him a wink and a reason for hope, just to break the monotonous repetition of nothing.
He felt hollow. His insides could have vanished, been pulled out and cast aside as the useless addled dead weight they’d soon become. He was hooked up to a drip that intravenously feeding him all the stuff whisky lacked. His wrist throbbed slightly but nothing hurt so he guessed he must be on morphine. It gave a distanting sensation, so different to alcohol which pulled the world in tight and then slammed the door in its face.

Ray closed his eyes and tried not to think about his wife and kids. About the mistakes he’d made. About the wrongs it was too late to make right. About the world and words he couldn’t write.

The bed to his left was still empty. Ray knew that the man who’d slept in it fitfully the day before, Ralph or Jimmy or Frank or Mike or whatever his name was with his poison of choice had died. That was the quickest way out of the hospital. Ray didn’t want to die. He wanted to write. He wanted to not want to drink. He wanted to be free of the drag to get drunk, the urge that demanded to be fed. He wanted to tell the world some truths. He knew how to do it, he knew what change he had to make, but it was so easy to say and so impossibly hard to think of doing.

'No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don't forget it."'
-Gravy by Raymond Carver.

This week’s David Marston Writes dramatises scenes from the lives of Dylan Thomas and Raymond Carver. They are not intended to be strictly accurate representations nor are they intended to cause any offence or distress to the estates of either man.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) wrote numerous poems, short stories and scripted short films for the BBC during the Second World War. He was arguably Wales’ finest poetic voice. His most famous work, Under the Milkwood, was due for release when he died suddenly of pneumonia complicated by alcohol abuse in New York. Caitlin Thomas was his wife.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) gave up drinking in 1978 and went on to write two short story collections, Cathedral and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as well as numerous poems, before he died of cancer. He is frequently acclaimed as the greatest exponent of the short story form in the twentieth century. The term Carverish tends to refer to a bleakly minimalist style.

Much of the inspiration for the hospital ward came from Christopher Palling’s 2009 Guardian article.

Grain

2011-04-06T22:33:00.006+01:00

It could be argued that when the young drink, when they are drunk, they are at their most beautiful. Or that they feel beautiful at least. Free and light. The old, the survivors, those who keep on drinking, they know that they’re the damned. The beautiful and the damned. One becomes the other.

Spirits are found the world over. By spirits I don’t mean derivatives of other alcoholic drinks, like brandy is a boosted version of wine, but the stuff that started off as cheap and nasty and from necessity. Spirits, just life’s ghosts. Vodka, whisky, gin, rum, tequila, and absinthe the sole purpose for the existence of these is drive the day’s demons out into the night.

Vodka, the proper stuff not the sickly flavoured spew designed to be disguised as sweets for oversized children, was invented during the ninth century somewhere in the so-called vodka-belt countries, those at one time or another under the domination of Moscow or St Petersburg, but in a significantly weaker state than what we’re used to. The full on version we know today came from Russia in the early fifteenth century and, like so many other drinks, was cultivated by monks. What was it about monks that they had so much time to be dosing about producing exciting and different drinks for people? Never mind. Vodka, the word, is derived from the Slavic for water. Kind of apt for a drink that is supposed to keep you alive in the depths of the harshest snow.

Vodka shouldn’t be fucked around with. Modern brands flavour it with cherry or bacon or chocolate, but at worst it should be infused with lemongrass or ginger, stuff that grows naturally, and ideally just leave it alone. It’s supposed to kick your eyeballs out. Just be grateful you’re not knocking back the homebrew stuff out a jam-jar somewhere on a post-Soviet farming collective in the Siberian steppes. And that’s how it should be drunk: hard and neat. There are rituals around vodka. It should be cold, which does dull the burn somewhat, and served in small shot glasses, toasted and necked in one before chatter continues and sometime later another will be poured. Get it over with, don’t linger. Enjoy it.

By the time I reached University I was an accomplished beer drinker. I knew my limits, knew my comfort zones. I felt that I was done with getting inadvertently legless, throwing up, waking up on a traffic roundabout, staggering around incoherently, setting shit on fire and bumping into the Police. I’d finished, or so I thought, experimenting with alcohol. I knew what I liked and what I liked was about a dozen pints of ale or Guinness and to go home. I liked pubs. Pubs like the one where I’d been born. Local pubs with wooden bars and no aluminium; music was an acceptable addition, but it didn’t need to be overbearing, did it?

Sheffield is a city. And whilst, to an extent, I had grown up in a bigger city (or at least adjacent to one) it was very much in a suburban outcast fashion and suddenly I found myself at the heart of something with a wider range of distractions. My friends wanted to go to nightclubs, which contrary to my previous experiences, were not either mildly threatening or pap filled dross pits, but venues packed with other students playing music I actually liked for once. They also wanted, occasionally, to go to large city centre pubs or shiny tiny bars, or even cocktail lounges of crappy hotels. When they had a happy hour. Not too often, usually because we couldn’t afford it, but, you know, sometimes. For a change. For something different.

At eighteen, I wasn’t too keen on change or diversity. I enjoyed routine, the same repeated again and again.

Ssh, whisper it: I was afraid of the unknown.

Gin is a particularly English drink. Made from the re-distilled neutral spirits of agriculture (in other words the excess grain mash that produces a highly alcoholic flammable liquid) and flavoured with juniper berries, its main attraction was its cheapness. It offered an affordable intoxication for all to lie in swills of the stuff.

Despite its popularity in seventeenth century England, or notoriety if not popularity with Hogarth’s gin alley being a fairly accurate portrayal of people who had nothing else to do all day except get fuck-eyed, it was a Dutch drink originally. William of Orange bought it over in the Glorious Revolution, but the Dutch had been enthusiastically using it for many years before, distributing it to soldiers during the eighty years war before battle to give them courage. Dutch courage. The Dutch version was a weaker one, and the English toughened it up, often mixing it with turpentine for a real kick.

It was also frequently used as a tonic. Firstly as an ineffective cure for the bubonic plague and then, as the empire expanded, the juniper flavour was found as an adequate way to disguise the potency of quinine, the anti-malaria, drug. All it really did was take a taste of home around the world.

Deep in the basement resturant, underneath the old streets of Soho where a few too many nights have been lost, both Stu and my girlfriend decided to swirl glasses of red wine under my nose.

‘Mmmm,’ they cooed. I pretended not to care, tried to act aloof as though it didn’t matter. And maybe, just maybe, it didn’t as much as it might have done.
Meanwhile, fourteen years earlier and two hundred miles further north my confidence, and some might say my sarcasm, increased. I became more prepared to branch out and try new experiences. Hell, I even began to enjoy myself.

So I started to occasionally drink spirits, either neat as shots or with mixers or in some fucking ridiculous multi-coloured combo with a stupid punning name and an umbrella sticking out the top.

But spirits aren’t controlled; I didn’t fully understand how to handle them properly. They’re volatile. After one particularly raucous first year party in the depressing bare brick corridors of Wolfson Flats I awoke about midday on the Sunday to find myself underneath the bed and stark naked. I had no idea what had been running through my mind to get myself there. The end of the evening was a blacked out mush filled with cans of Ward’s bitter and a potent vodka based punch that filled a vast red plastic trough (a container that until about two and a half years ago continued to be used as a receptacle for my recycling).

The thing was, though, I didn’t care. Drink and the oblivion, the unknown end to the night was starting to seem enticing. I was never one of those people who feels full on beer, yet in addition to discovering a particular penchant for red wine I embarked on the enthusiasm for pints of gin and tonic, seventy-six percent rum bought back from Spain and vodka and cokes for that sugary caffeine kick in the days before red bull. In short, anything and everything and bugger the consequences.

It was whilst at University that I started to get into whisky (although not yet seriously). At this time I took my scotch and Irish neat, taking pleasure in the searing sting at the back of the throat. Maybe it was a precocious drink for a twenty-year old to choose, but I enjoyed a short night cap or to work my way through a couple of healthy doses of Jameson’s whilst reading history text books with music blasting out. Finally, I felt like I was graduating to the serious drinking stuff.
No more messing about with beer and wine; this was the real deal. Whisky was what the real men drank, what anti-heroes in stories took to.

At the battle of Trafalgar, Nelson’s broken and bloody body was stuffed into a barrel of rum to bring the hero back from the southern seas to the land of his birth. Upon docking in Britain, the lid of the cast was removed and pickled body extracted, but the barrel was also empty. Closer inspection revealed that the bottom had been tampered with and sailors had been sneakily stealing tots of rum, presumably unaware that it was also laced with the Admiral’s blood and gore.

Rum is made by distilling sugar-cane and then aging the product in oak barrels. Slightly different processes for different colours, but essentially the same stuff. White rum is smoother, deliberately so for mixing, whilst dark rum’s the real pirate stuff, the sort of drink that rots your gut with a yo-ho-ho. The Royal Navy used to mix it with beer to make grog and the infantry in world war one had a daily rum ration to keep their spirits up amongst the bodies and the rain filled craters and the mud drenched trenches of Flanders.

Saturday night and I found myself still walking after twelve hours, still putting one foot in front of the other, darkness sneaked around, coiling us in a chilled breath. Inside I felt empty. Almost forty miles done, I just needed to keep walking. To keep moving forwards, towards the end. My insides ached, as though floating in space, adrift from my consciousness. My shoulders and neck felt bolted through with iron as the head torches danced gently amongst the steamed breath. The pain, the frustration was inevitable and yet, knowing there was no real choice, we had gone and done it anyway.

Once, once I would have wanted a drink at the end of this. Once, once I would have craved a cold beer to flush down my gullet and to let my brain float off after my body. That evening I just want to lie down, close my eyes and wish it away.

‘I don’t think I have a morsel of energy left. I’m moving on stubbornness alone.’

‘Well that shouldn’t be a problem,’ replied Google-Steve implausibly chipper. ‘You’ve deep reserves of that.’

The consequences of drinking in the Yorkshire pubs and clubs with such abandon weren’t insignificant. Despite being told on more than one occasion that “it’s impossible to tell when you’re pissed; you’re just the same,” I knew when I’d passed the point because I’d have to concentrate harder on retaining any sort of physical coordination. I would need to cover one eye to reduce the double, triple, quadruple vision, my eyeballs would feel loose in their sockets, indulge in some petty theft of things like ashtrays, pint glasses and the odd sofa and sprained my ankle so many times that now the cartilage is all but worn away. Oh, and then the morning after would be hell. Perhaps I was just a slow learner, never really taking on board any of the hangover prevention techniques I heard about. A Nurofen or two before going to sleep worked for one person. Drinking a pint of water never seemed sufficient. Tactical vomiting somewhat distasteful. But when the sun finally barraged its way into my student bedroom it would frequently find me groaning miserably under the covers for, surprisingly given that I was so keen on getting drunk, I suffered greatly with hangovers.

My girlfriend recently referred to herself as “feeling quite hung-over”, which sounded out of character. Given that she only “had a couple of drinks” and went to bed at four, I suspected she was more tired than anything else. Being quite hung-over in Sheffield was something more dramatic. It frequently felt as though someone was trying to extract my brain from my skull with fish hooks stuffed up my nostrils. Every movement caused a pulse of agony to run along my bones from the top to my toes. My gut swirled and I would vomit until there wasn’t anything left and then my poisoned stomach would continue to convulse leaving me to retch weakly yet with noisy echoes in the toilet.

And yet, there was, I convinced myself, something coolly noble about all of this silliness.

Much like the bohemian artistes found absinthe, not something mystical but simply a drink based on wormwood plant and fennel. The French refer to the Green Fairy taking over, as the writer or artist succumbed to the effects, but aside from getting you royally pissed its effects have been exaggerated. It has a dangerous edge to it which is grounded more in fiction and convenience than anything else. For example, in 1905 Jean Lanfray murdered his wife and children in Switzerland after imbibing in absinthe and the authorities used it as justification to ban the spirit, helpfully forgetting to acknowledge that Lanfray was an alcoholic who started every day with two glasses of the stuff. Whilst it was banned across much of Europe, Britain never officially got around to it and in fact it simply went out of fashion.

Meanwhile, whilst I was fantasising I was growing up, failing to realise I wasn’t, I also became even more deeply obsessed with music and in particular with Shane MacGowan and the Pogues. MacGowan is commonly seen as a something of a lyrical genius wasted by booze. A talent ultimately destroyed by his own inability to slow down. His lyrics whilst at once emotionally sentimental and heart-warmingly romantic also recount an idyllic life of pubs and clubs and beer and hard spit. Lines like “I’ll walk into a bar and drink fifteen pints of beer” casually tossed into the Boys of the County Hell like it was an everyday occurrence. And it probably was. I played their records again and again, wallowing in the pathos of it all and singing, no doubt tunelessly, along much, I am sure, to the disdain of my housemates who must have wished I’d just shut the fuck up at two in the morning or whenever it was.

But it felt like an isolated moment in time. It felt like I was just being a student. After all, being into music too much and drinking too much and sleeping too much and eating badly and having to hold my arm by the wrist to stop the morning after shakes as I tried to drink my tea was what I supposed to do. When I graduated, after a final summer hurrah and some farewell boozing up and down the city, I found myself broke, living at home and working back in the pub where I was born.

The odd thing about working behind a bar with my clothes and hands permanently smelling slightly of beer was that I wasn’t so bothered about having a drink. I drove to the pub and worked most nights. A drink became something sporadic.
Sensibleness wasn’t to last though, more is the pity.

And as for whisky, well it’s just like the old song goes ‘whisky is the life of man.’
American, if you really, really must, or Irish, Jameson’s or Bushmill’s, Catholic or Irish, even Welsh, but, oh, for Scotch is where the lifeblood truly is.

Ernest Hemingway was a mammoth of a literary man, at least in his own imagination. Hemingway believed that life needed to be grappled to the death. He was a big bear rooted to the physical, arguably an unusual state of being for a writer, most of whom seem to prefer the quiet of a darkened room, but perhaps it suited his terse compact style where the words not being written were almost as important as those that were.

Hemingway took every physicality seriously. He hunted, fished, went to war more than twice, fucked and drank his way around the world. Drinking in a bawdy, hugging, male embracive way is Hemingway’s legend. It has even become fictionalised with, amongst others, Logan Mountstuart, the fictional author from William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, getting pissed up in bomb strewn Madrid with Hemingway paying the bill for gallons of red wine. Wine blood red like the streets around them.

But Hemingway found that the body fails no matter how much the myth wishes to prevail. A lifetime of gruelling challenges and excesses, shrapnel wounds, repetitive car and aircraft accidents, almost decapitating himself with a skylight in Paris, all took their toll. The voices in his head, telling him that he wasn’t as true and as real as he’d hoped started in the 1940s. He mocked and gloated over his friend, William Faulkner’s, decline; laughing at Faulkner for his inability to keep up with Hemingway’s prodigious intake, to write through the drunkenness, and all the while, in the secret dread of the night, Hemingway nervously looked up liver cirrhosis in library books.

The fear of failing, of falling, grew despite the Nobel Prize. Until, one cold morning in 1961, shortly after a bout of electro convulsive therapy for depression, Hemingway got out of bed and went out on to the porch of his wilderness home. The landscape would have crept around in the dull hours, tensing him for the day ahead. Unable to stomach the disappointment of age yet again he loaded both barrels of his favourite shotgun, placed it in his mouth and squeezed. In the end, his liver protruded from his gut like a long fat leech.

Hemingway, or maybe Gertrude Stein depending on whose estate you believe, coined the phrase The Lost Generation. It was intended to refer to a generation of Americans who came back from the first world war and its peripheral tragedies. Those who couldn’t understand the highlife of 1920s’ American boom. Alienated, they clustered in Paris and found their own hedonism, one ground in higher ascetics than share prices, but it also has its own sorrow. Lost, for they would never truly find themselves. Thanks to the war or just an inability to cope with the acceleration of the twentieth century, they were, in the main, pulled apart by their own fears and foibles. Lost, forever drifting on the edge until there was nothing left to hold onto. Hemingway wanted to be a hero, “show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his notebook.

Fitzgerald was Hemingway’s contemporary in that loose-knit group. The two shared a friend ship of hostility and jealousness, but genuine affection. Hemingway was never one to truly compliment anyone, but of Fitzgerald he said “his talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.”

Fitzgerald coined his own phrase to describe the world he found himself in: The Jazz Age. A time of illegal highballs, flappers with shortish skirts and tightly bobbed hair, exhibitionism and the bebop free style of brass late at night. Unlike the rest of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald tried to own the twenties, to define it as his age. But Fitzgerald was a slight ghost of a man who’d never seem combat and had been a fully-blown alcoholic since his college days. Hardly the shape of someone who could set a generation. He even had to pretend to suffer from tuberculosis to cover up his illness, to conceal the pickling of his insides.

In 1940, aged just forty-four, he suffered two heart attacks in quick succession. The second killed him instantly, bringing him first to his feet from a chair, and then crashing to the floor, the remnants of a candy bar on his lips.

Whilst his death was quick, his dying wasn’t. Fitzgerald wasn’t a fool he knew what was coming just as he knew he could do nothing to prevent it. He knew he lacked the will to stop to drinking, even if he’d wanted, and he could feel his internal organs breaking down. In 1937 Esquire magazine published his short story An Alcoholic Case which tells the shift of a nurse tending to an alcoholic cartoonist. It not only highlights his awareness of the inevitable, that he knew he would do anything for a drink and that it eventually it will kill him, but it also recognises how feeble and pathetic he believed the rest of the world saw him as. A waste. A life discarded.

“She stared at his handsome face, weak and defiant--afraid to turn even half-way because she knew that death was in that corner where he was looking. She knew death--she had heard it, smelt its unmistakable odour, but she had never seen it before it entered into anyone, and she knew this man saw it in the corner of his bathroom; that it was standing there looking at him while he spat from a feeble cough and rubbed the result into the braid of his trousers. It shone there crackling for a moment as evidence of the last gesture he ever made.”

The beautiful and the damned, indeed. Or, as he wrote for Jay Gatsby’s funeral in his masterpiece: “The poor son a bitch.”

Hops

2011-03-29T22:44:00.002+01:00

After the beginning, there is a journey. The narrative thrusts onwards and upwards relentlessly towards something clear. A point. Or that’s how it often is in stories. A fictional journey has expectations around it. Real life often, unfortunately, confounds these by taking a more meandering scenic route. It has a tendency to dawdle round in rhythms of its own devising for a while, curling up into a fixed routine and before you know it years have passed. Or a habit we will have settled upon.

This isn’t necessarily real life. Nor is it entirely a story.

Once a glass of wine opened the floodgates it wasn’t too long before I began sampling other alcoholic drinks in the supervised environment of the family home. Crème de Menthe became a firm after-lunch Christmas Day tipple, with which I would retreat into the quiet corner of my grandparents’ house, savour its sweetly sticky luminous greenness and read is isolation. Wine and liqueurs, easy flavours. Already, I was discovering that I quite liked how the words felt on the page when I had a drink to go with them.

But my new best friend was beer. Many people will say that it took them a while to understand what all the fuss was about with beer. Their first experience was not a happy one, but a confused moment of wondering why people drank the odd-tasting gassy stuff before preserving out of social obligation, out of a need to feel cool. Not me. As far as I recall it was love at first sup. (Although, once again, this could all be wrongly remembered.) At first I was weaned on bog-standard lagers, Heineken and Carlsberg’s UK market under four percent versions, Carling Black-Label (as it was then fully known) and the wonderfully bland Skol.

Skol is an odd beer. In contrast to most beer’s regional roots, Skol was consciously developed by a collection of breweries to be an international brand that could be sub-licensed at a local level. Shame they forget to make it taste nice. The British version was brewed by the Carlsberg-Tetley in Leeds, but to give it an air of the continental it was marketed by cartoon Vikings chugging away at vast tankards of the stuff chanting their drinking song: Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol, Skol. It is perhaps reflective of a less analysed age that lager could be marketed by a historical group best renowned for raping and pillaging and not get into trouble for promoting domestic violence when the man’s tea wasn’t on the table the moment he fell through the door after a heroic drinking session.

The main thing I remember about Skol was swiping cans of it to drink in my bedroom, hiding the empties behind the curtain and retrieving them in the morning to be ditched in a bin up the road somewhere. What, I thought, made me really sneaky was that I took it from the cupboard in the hall rather than the fridge, which of course meant I had to drink it warm, but I was convinced was less likely to be noticed. I suspect my parents instead chose to turn a blind eye as indeed they almost certainly did to my experimenting with measures of spirits in the cupboards, trying out whisky and water when I’d been left alone in the house under the pretext of doing some homework. Mischievous, but then isn’t mischief expected of teenage boys?

When my friend’s father died, I came home from college at lunch time to an empty house and fixed myself a whisky. I sat in the lounge, still in my coat and shoes, and drank the burning scotch before washing out the glass and putting it back in the cupboard. I remember doing this, but I wish I could remember what was going through my mind. Perhaps it was just what I thought was expected. I was replicating something I’d seen in a film or read in a book. When in moments of shock or grief a stiff drink will help.

Whilst, as we discussed last week, some writers have drunk seeking creative inspiration, maybe there is also a small cadre of writers who drank because it was expected of them, as though people somehow confused the people they wrote about and the author himself.

This distinction was not helped by people like Henry Miller deliberately blurring the lines between fiction and fact by writing things like the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. These books were marketed and produced as novels and yet the subject matter shadow Miller’s own nineteen thirties’ existence as he drank and fucked his way through Parisian society. At times it reads like little more than the dirty, drunken diary written beneath the sheets whilst this eye balls struggled to focus, but at other moments Miller cut to the core of what makes people function. Or fail to function.

Beer is arguably one of the world’s cornerstones. It is the most widely produced and deeply drunk alcoholic beverage, one which archaeologists have argued originated in what is now Iraq sometime around the moment man grunted his way into cereal harvesting. Part of its beauty is its simplicity. All that is required is some sort of cereal baseline, maize or wheat or corn, fermented with yeast and then flavoured, usually by hops. That something so straightforward can produce such a myriad range of wondrously tasty and diverse products is testament not only to the ingenuity of man, but the marvel of nature. Possibly even, to quote Thomas Jefferson, ‘proof of the existence of God and that he wishes us to be happy.’ Whilst the addition of, for example, a smudge of caramel can create interesting concoctions, the need for the fundamental basics to remain pure is strong. In the UK the Campaign for Real Ale snootily dismisses anything that’s been too mucked around with and in Germany the purity laws mean that each type of beer must be made in the way they have always been or else.

I suspect to breach these laws is punishable by a fine, but I quite like the idea of specially made prisons being filled up with criminals who tried to pasteurise a pilsner or stuck bloody blackcurrent in what’s supposed to be a wheat beer and being forced to drink Caffreys or Michelob every evening until it comes out their nose.

Whilst I was initially reared on lager, I quickly gravitated towards bitter.
Partly, I suspect, this was because I wanted to stand out from the in-crowd; partly,
I hope, it was a genuine affection for the taste, even if it was simply an acknowledgement that there was something more complex going on rather than a true appreciation. However, in the early-nineties the real-ale explosion had yet to happen and the range commonly available outside of pubs was limited to John Smiths, Tetley’s, bloody Newcastle Brown and the odd special bottle of things like Bishop’s Finger; in retrospect more interesting for its odd name than the flavour which today I find a bit blergh.

So, in the interim I found a different long tall alcoholic drink to differentiate me from the other teenage boys hanging around outside Victoria Wine’s: Guinness. Ah, a drop of the black stuff. These days Guinness is something I tend to steer clear of, partly from the over-sentimentalising of all things Paddy-cute, partly because of the nasty things it did to my bowels one hefty drinking session in Galway, partly because of the smug attempts at suggesting it is something world defining found in its advertising, but in the early nineties, Guinness was still promoting itself through genuinely entertaining and amusing adverts and was an unusual choice for a young boy-man to have as his tipple.

(Tch, listen to me. If the government ever wanted to do a case study of how advertising encouraged children to drink, I’d be a perfect poster boy.)

And so after several years of socially having a drink with my parents on a Saturday evening and on general special and not-so-special occasions, such as dropping in on my grandparents whilst walking the dog on a Sunday morning, and a shorter period of time lurking around off licences wondering if my long-black trench coat and increasingly shaggy hair was any aid to getting served or not, I finally entered the pub where I was born.

Dashiell Hammett’s creations Nick and Nora Charles, the detectives in the Thin Man, knock back whisky and sodas like they were tap water. Indeed, it’s impressive they’re ever sober enough to catch the criminal as their favourite hobby seems to be hanging around their New York hotel room just, well, drinking.

Hammett too was an industrial drinker and perhaps he couldn’t combine it with work, for the Thin Man was the last of his five novels which helped to define American hard-boiled/noir detective fiction. Hammett’s style dispensed with internal monologues and explanations of thought, simply recounting what characters did and driving narrative through dialogue. Simple and yet perhaps a wider expanse would have enabled him to keep writing, to keep being interested, to purge his own demons.

Seemingly unable or uninterested in writing, Hammett became a campaigner for the left-wing and for social justice and found himself jailed for contempt of court when he failed to reveal the local of communists who had skipped bail. When he came out of prison, his lover, the playwright Lillian Hellman, said that ‘jail had made the thin man thinner.’ He died of complications from tuberculosis exasperated by a lifetime of drink and cigarettes in 1961 having not published a word for almost thirty years.

Surprisingly, hops, the most common form of flavouring, is not particularly traditional. Initially used by Germans monks, the addition of roast hops to English didn’t occur until comfortably in the middle ages, after several hundred years of brewing. Before then the flavours were even more wide-reaching taking in roots such as ginger, various fruits, even flowers such as dandelion, and the ever popular Mead flavoured with honey. The arrival of hops saw great rolling acres of Kentish countryside given over to their cultivation and the tradition of cockneys from the capital spending the summer out on the land securing their drinking winter. The garden of England was in fact a vast plantation for beer’s raw ingredients.

The production of beer always used to be highly localised, with regional areas producing distinct brews based around the flavour of the local water, for example the heavy water of Dublin being particularly apt for dark Stout and the gypsum heavy soil of Burton ideal for Pale Ales, and other regional tastes and fashions. The industrialisation posed a heavy threat to this process enabling the mass transportation of beer around a country or continent without having to resort to the horrific American tradition of pasteurisation which makes most of their product flavourless gold piss. For a while the new future and the contracting of the world in the second half of the twentieth century threatened to standardise beer into a bland inoffensive drink where you knew it would be the same wherever you went. But beer fought back.

In the late seventies and early eighties, in Britain anyway, the battle was almost lost to the likes of Martin Amis’ Keith Talent character promoting lager as a necessity to his darts playing because “Lager’s kegged. Kegged. Standard. You know what you’re getting, some of these local brews…” In the end, though, it appears that beer has won out and only the dullest most tedious of drinking establishments offering fucking Carling or bottles of Bud as the sole option.

Talent is one of those characters in one of those books that just makes me want to have a drink to hand whilst I read it. David Peace’s Damned United was the same. As was Graham Swift’s Last Orders. There’s just so much drinking taking place that it seems rude not to be having one too. But that’s a failure to distinguish fiction from real life; the former stops the later tries not to.

Here, let me tell you a secret, expose another fiction: Beer doesn’t make you fat.
The beer belly is something of a myth. What makes you fat is being pissed up, stumbling off the bus that’s taken you a few hundred metres down the high street, falling through the door of the takeaway and getting a large doner kebab or three quarters of a chicken deep fried and coated in salt and fat, struggling home and then flopping down on your arse to watch late night TV with no content nor soul, as you chug down another couple of cans for a nightcap. Trust me. I know.

And another myth: Radegast, the Slavic God of hospitality invented beer. I like that legend. Beer is something easy to give. It’s a common language, a gift small enough to share with everyone. Who else, but a god of hospitality, would give it to us. I never used to count the value of a pint; standing someone a drink of ale in a pub was no more than offering the plumber who came to fix your boiler a cup of tea. It's what you were expected to do. At the very least, it gave you someone to talk to in the pub on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

People keep telling me that I must be feeling more alert. ‘You’ll notice it after a while,’ someone recently said. ‘Friends of mine who have stopped drinking can’t believe how sharp they feel.’ To be honest, I don’t feel more tuned in; I just feel knackered all the time. Okay so I’ve generally substituted alcohol (a stimulant) withherbal tea (a relaxant), but even so: I’ve been crushingly, brain drudgingly, gut stomping shattered every evening and the mornings are little better. I don’t awake with clarity from a deep and restful sleep, but rather find myself muddled and confused, my attention slipping as the day wears on. Mental oblivion, a mind distracted by tedium, a memory flooded by images of childhood continually replaying process of youth it all feels overwhelming. I want a way out.

My Dad gave up drinking sometime around the time I was ten or eleven, I think. Certainly before I became a teenager. He stopped for no particular reason. Just because. He still liked to tell tales of marathon pub sessions, of the folly of youth. After all, who doesn’t? But he indulged no longer. I wonder if my decision to embrace alcohol was enthusiastically (and it was a conscious decision, I believe) was one of those ways teenage boys try to find to both emulate and simultaneously mark themselves as distinct from their fathers?

Inside that first pub was warm when outside there was a chill to the winter evening and it bustled when the streets were empty. People were crushed together, young and old, laughter and debate, the clink of glasses and the sour faced people who’d lost so much that their only consolation was to have another and try to forget. I was in a group, but being skint youngsters, we’d queued individually to buy our drinks. As I waited my turn amongst the hustle I tired to think of ways in which I’d guarantee being served, ways in which I could suggest I was older than I was.

I asked for a Guinness not only because it was what I really wanted, but because part of me thought it would sound more convincing.

The boys I was with that night, I don’t know what happened to any of them. I am no longer in touch with any of them, they’re just names lost down the years, but that evening they were the best friends a guy could ever have and that pub was to be the centre of my world for the next couple of years. If anyone wondered where I was, come rain or shine, it was invariable that I could be found down the pub where I was born for the second time.

It was a local’s pub; I didn’t need to know everyone’s name, but it was sufficient to recognise the faces and the same drinks being raised to their lips at the same time each week, like the natural patterns of the earth. Years later, I would find myself on the other side of the bar taking the pump and the mystique would be eroded, battered open by the mundane inevitability of life, not that I ever fully fell out of love with that pub: it was everything and it was mine.

I even ended up structuring a series of interlocking short stories focused around somewhere that could very easily be mistaken for that pub. Tch, sentimental toss of course, but it was sentimentality I wanted to share. At sixteen I genuinely believed I was writing something original from the inside of a drunk, how romantic can the young be?

Never a stranger to heavy drinking’s romance, Raymond Chandler’s everyman character Phillip Marlowe became increasingly embittered and disillusioned with the world over the course of his fictional life. By the time of, arguably, Chandler’s finest novel the Long Goodbye, the author was heartbroken as his wife slowly died from a long illness and sunk deep in a bottle, much the way Marlow would have done. Chandler still managed to pull this outstanding line from the bottom of his depression: ‘Alcohol is like love; the first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third routine. After which you just take her clothes off.’ It’s the despair that makes it work so well. Love isn’t really like that, but habit is. Drink or sex, at the end of the journey you just resent it.

Beer has been on a journey of its own. It used to be drunk instead of water. In Medieval times weak, happily flavoured ale and bitter would be chugged down over breakfast. Too shallow in alcohol to induce drunkenness, safer than water with all the disease filtered out by the brewing. Medieval brewers were the public health experts of their times. It’s a practice that has only recently died out. Table beer, a popular Belgium beer of less than 1% by volume, was often served alongside school meals until the 1970s. Its popularity has finally fallen in recent years due to the rise of fizzy pop and mineral water.

And so now there are numerous types of beer, each wondrous in its own way. From the standard Pilsner pale Lagers to the hoppy English bitters to the roast malts of Stouts and the more obscure Belgian Abbey and trappist ales, the German Kolsch, only legally allowed to be brewed in the Cologne, area, or traditional Midlands milds, the sweet Scottish heather beer, or African Tusker malty-hoppy delight or thick deeply dark Czech lager, each, like wine, has its own suitability and place in the canon. For the discerning drinker it is not a case of either all, it is not a case of Stella Artois, that Cardiff brewed slop, or nothing else. Anything goes, so long as it is served at the right temperature in a pleasant atmosphere. And yet it is something special to be savoured, not just fuel to be consumed. Its purpose isn’t to clean the water, but to entertain; to provide stories to regale your friends with. To provide romantic myths.

In the late eighteenth, early nineteen century steel tankards were popular in Britain during the winter. Pokers would be left stuffed in the fire and a chilled drinker could take the hot metal spike and use it to warm his beer up. This may be complete bollocks. It may be invented, if so not by me. It may be folklore, but who cares? That’s kind of the point. A drinker has a myth to cling onto; an illusion of something romantic.

The other evening the old man staggered along the aisles of the eight-thirty train out of Charing Cross. His movements surged against the rocking of the carriage, his left hand stuttered from head rest to pole hauling him upright whilst his right hand, his drinking hand, clutched a glass half-full of what looked like whisky.

‘How you doing, son?’ he slurred as his reached the area by the doors where I’d tried to bury myself inside a book.

‘I’m all right. You?’ I replied, nodding at his glass.

‘Oh, aye.’ He took a gleeful sip of his drink. ‘Never better.’ The train clicker-clacked its way through the dulled city outside. ‘I’ve had a lovely day, I have.’

‘I bet.’

‘Aye. Taken myself up town. Had a rare old time. Seen some of the fellas. Had a few bevies. A snifter of the stiff stuff.’ He smiled through cracked yellowing-grey teeth, the curl of his lips sinking his scattershot reddened cheeks into their hollows. ‘Sssh!’ He put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I might be a touch tipsy.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I smiled back. I couldn’t help myself. The old guy deserved his final hurrahs. If he wanted to get pissed up on a mid-week afternoon, why shouldn’t he? ‘Where are you going now? To where the party is?’

‘Nah.’ He took another sip. ‘I’m going home to bed. Except…’ He trailed off and stared hard at me. For the first time I noticed the broken welling up in his eyes. ‘Except I don’t know where that is anymore.’

Before I could form a reply the train had lurched to a halt, the doors open and off he had staggered into the dark of New Cross Gate.

Grapes

2011-03-24T21:50:00.002Z

In the beginning it was a many splendoured thing. Something that was full of beauty. A composite of colour and light and to all that it touched, it gave mirth and delight.

Or so I imagined, as a child, watching the ruby red, golden and beech brown drinks pass over the lips of the adults. And as they drank the chatter and laughter and sometimes song that followed gleefully in its wake was something magical to behold.
Or perhaps, that’s just how I imagined it would be. Perhaps, after I had been sent to bed, I lay awake and stared at the ceiling with its ripples of plaster, craggy like the sides of mountains or the cliff faces along the steepest coasts, and I made up exciting lives downstairs where people still awake were allowed to be upright.

There has always been mystery at the bottom of a glass. It was there long before me and you, long before the adults in my child eyes and long before the adults in their childhood memories and even before everyone long gone who populated the smoke broken stories of highjinks and nostalgic remorse that filled the air. We, humanity, have been drinking for longer than is probably good for us.

Hasn’t it been beautiful?

Alcohol and the consumption thereof have formed a part of civilisation for thousands of years. There is evidence of wine being consumed in China as far back as 7000BC and beer in ancient Egypt. In both cases it wasn’t something to be squandered causally, not something that was idly consumed just as an aside to food. It wasn’t ingested for sustenance. It was something spiritual. Access to a higher life came in a glass.

(Or possibly not glass, depending upon when glass was invented. A clay pot, perhaps? Or a leather stitched skin?)

Times have changed, though. In the far-flung past there were no blue gloop drinks served against throbbing bass beats in murkily lit rooms. When I think of alcohol in the past it is always wine. Perhaps in a golden goblet.

Wine was originally concocted in the areas that are now Armenia, Georgia and Iran, and was scooped up for wider European consumption as the ancient Greeks foraged further eastwards. The Greeks though were a temperate lot. The image of toga-glad drunken meals descending into orgies is more Roman. The Greeks, however, believed in a little of everything. Keen on order and control, wanton drunkenness was frowned upon. Their wine was intended to be watered down and diluted, indeed it was only made in its purer form for easier transportation.

But Greek society was fractured, divided along lines of belief. The cult of Dionysus was the exception. Dionysus, the God of wine. Dionysus, the twice born man, torn from his mother’s womb and then carried inside Zeus’ thigh to term completion. He was forced to hide disguised as a girl on an isolated island for his youth, finally driven mad by Hera and then, almost accidentally, conquered India by force of arms. Sounds like the sort of life where a few too many would explain a lot.

His victory over India meant that he was usually portrayed in victory procession, his chariot being pulled along by panthers, his arrival being met by jubilation and its associated revelry. And his followers drank for all they were worth, for intoxication bought them closer to their God. Drunkenness was close to Godliness. Yet, for a long time the Dionysians were an exclusive club, a niche club, mainly based in Macedonia, until their most famous son conquered most of the known world. A heavy night never seemed to slow Alexander the Great up much.

The Romans, as they were want to do, incorporated the Greek God dynasties into their own magpie religious make-up. For Rome, assimilating local beliefs, repackaging and reselling them back was a standard subjection tactic. And so, from Dionysus came Bacchus.

Bacchus, like most other Roman Gods, found his portfolio of patronages expanded beyond his original brief and he became the God of Theatre and the God of Agriculture as well. Perhaps the links are obvious; theatre types happily embracing a wine and song lifestyle even back then, whilst agricultural drinkers, equally heavy going and perhaps more deserving of refreshment at the end of a sun-cracked working day.

Bacchus and Dionysus; two names for one deity prone to wandering amongst his worshippers sprinkling magic in his wake. And there is something rather magical about wine. I’m not sure if it’s the universal heritage, the fact that most alcohol producing countries have found similar process of fermenting fruit, if not always grapes, into juice with a zip, or perhaps the process with which it all comes together. There is something deeply personal about making wine. Sure, it’s also deeply commercialised and automated in the twenty-first century, but in its most basic form when the firm richly coloured grapes are plucked from the lying vines crawling across the valley and they are crushed between people’s toes, the same people whose families have been bound to the land for generations, then it is almost as though you are drinking someone’s heritage. A little bit of their soul. In the end, making wine is difficult, but for centuries people have forced a way through, because it’s worth it.

Wine attracts debate because people care about it passionately. All the petty little rituals get bound up in the sense of drinking something important. Should it be decanted or not? Are rubber stoppers ever a sufficient alternative to traditional corks? What temperature, given that today’s central heating boosts the warmth of the average room, should red wine be served at? Can the precocious new world wines ever live up the heritage of the competition or is the old world too wrapped up its own tradition of self-importance to actually produce good wine anymore? Is the damn stuff even healthy? How on earth, when their diet is flooded with saturated fat, do the French have traditionally lower instances of heart disease than other areas of Western Europe? The French Paradox, a mystery wrapped up in a way of life, concealed behind a refusal to compromise, supported by God’s breath in a ruby red filled glass at every table in every home with every meal.

But passion also breeds eccentrics. I have encountered several people who work in wine as importers, sellers and general all round enthusiasts over the years and two of whom were somewhat characterful. One had the most cock-eyed approach to profit margins I’ve ever encountered seeming content for vast waves of stock to act as an unequal exchange for goods, or occasionally just favours, plus a rather odd obsession with marking his territory by pissing outside his house. The other was entrenched in a bed and breakfast on the Welsh borders and wrote odd rants about society in general and wine in particular into his product catalogue. It was as ugh he hoped to entice a customer base, but refused to change his ways because wine doesn’t. It always stays the same and waits for the world to sensibly accommodate it.

I don’t remember the first drink I ever had. I suspect I was rather young. Certainly, I remember being young enough to still be over-excited by the prospect of Christmas morning when I was allowed an alcoholic drink the night before. Nothing too powerful, just that bastion of seventies and eighties taste disaster: Babycham. I remember the bubbles against the back of my throat and the glee in being able to follow the adults. (Or do I? Am I just muddling this up with want again?) It was my parents’ idea. A festive drink that was not only a treat, but that would also ease me to sleep. It didn’t work. Instead, I remember the minutes ticking down on the clock by my pillow and, bored by the dwindling dark, I decided to press a switched on torch against my eye. Gazing deep into the light, I marvelled at the hidden world inside. I imagined walking the light structures and girders of gold, of mixing between beams that curved within the light. I cast myself deep inside where perhaps there was something more. I stared harder, trying to work out its mysteries. I knew I wouldn’t sleep for I was too awakened to the possibility of what the world’s morning might bring.

Last Friday was harder than I had expected. My plans were disrupted and I was stuck at home alone. The week had been heady and the adrenaline was draining away. I was ten days into my enforced sobriety and the half-drunk bottles of spirits on the kitchen floor, stuffed up in the gap between the shelves, and, most of all, the glistening wine bottles in their rank on the window sill, the late evening light caressing their bulbs, were whispering temptation down my ear. I was tired and surprisingly bored by my own company. There was a nagging that scratched at the inside of my skull and I wanted a drink.

Wine has, over the centuries, become an integral part of many religious ceremonies. Much like the hallucinogenics, for example, of Native Americans cultures, a drop of alcohol is the cornerstone of the Jewish Kiddush ceremony and the Christian Eucharist ritual. In the latter, the dark (often cheap) deep red wine is intended to represent the blood of Christ the saviour. Devotion at such a fully immersed level seems, to my no-doubt damned soul, utterly bizarre. Do we really want to be drinking the blood of the Lord, like some weirdly sycophantic vampires? Probably not, but if one argument for the rapid and powerful rise of state religion in early-medieval society is that it was an extension of the crown’s authority, a way to keep the populace compliant and docile, then a free tipple on Sunday was the icing on the cake, the added bonus to doing as you were told. It was your earthly reward from the Kingdom of Heaven for your unswerving devotion.

But, once again, this was nothing new. Dionysus had his blood replaced with wine, almost an inversion of the sacrament. In China, the drinking of rice wine mixed with blood would supposedly bring life to the oddly precise age of on-hundred and ninety. St Bernard described wine as the link between fear and strength and perhaps this not only explains its presence in religion, but why people become dependant upon it.

Writers, as has been discussed in this blog before, are notorious for liking a tipple. The reasons as to why are too varied o thoroughly discuss here, but perhaps they are too poor to afford hard drugs but with as much time alone, lost inside someone else’s head as actors or rock and roll stars, and so turn to booze for relief. Maybe, but the majority of writers have had to maintain some sort of additional career to support both their habit and their love, not for them the many idle hours between sound-checks and the audience’s arrival and the night time loneliness of the tour machine drifting through another unknown town.

Robert Stone, in a 1985 Paris Review Interview said “If you do something you’re really pleased with, you’re in the crazy position of being exhilarated by yourself. I remember finishing one section…in the basement of a college library…and I staggered out in tears, talking to myself…It’s hard to come down from your work – it’s one of the reasons writers drink. The exhilaration of your work turns into the daily depression of the aftermath, but if you heal yourself with a lot of scotch you’re not fit for duty.”

So is booze a short-term fix to come down from the incredible high of writing? When the euphoria of a sentence, or a paragraph or (glory be) a whole scene clicks into place and you genuinely feel as though the words coming down on the page are cut from your heart and could possibly change the world, do you require some sort of assistance to prise yourself off the ceiling? Graham Greene probably thought so. Although he claimed to only possibly be able to write cold sober, he was more than partial to a drink even answering the first question of his own Paris Review Interview in 1953 with “[I’ll be] Very frank. Now, what will you have to drink?” Alcohol filled Greene’s non-writing time. He collected miniature whisky bottles, felt the need to write to a friend with great excitement when the bar of some random airport he was passing through during his relentless globe criss-crossing phase stocked his favourite gin, and once described his peak production phase as being based around rising early, churning out 500 to 750 words in the morning and then relaxing with a drink on an exotic veranda somewhere tropical.

Similarly, William Faulkner would stay largely sober whilst actually writing and then take himself out on a heroic binge to celebrate the completion, or to counteract the boredom of having nothing to write about, to help him walk with everyone else. This sort of behaviour was permissible even encouraged, for in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, before Elvis, writers were rock and roll. No-one was going to tell Kingsley Amis he couldn’t drink a bottle of whisky a day if he didn’t want to because, well, he was Kingsley Amis and he’d earned it. It was what people wanted him to do.

Others have used it as a crux to produce work, seeking inspiration in the broken down barriers in the brain that booze provides. In On Writing, Stephen King describes sitting in his attic pounding at the typewriter to produce the Shining, an overflowing ashtray and steadily diminishing bottles of painkillers and scotch and blood streaming out his nose from all the cocaine he’d snorted (King’s staggering success with Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot perhaps singling him out as an exception to the ‘can’t afford hard drugs’ rule).

Similarly, JG Ballard used to steadily grind his way through a bottle of whisky whilst letting the lack of reservations allow him to ask the questions most of us wouldn’t. In contrast to King, Ballard’s existence was gloriously suburban. He would get up, take his children to school in Shepperton, park his car (“It goes better after a couple of drinks.”) outside the semi-detached house and its neatly aligned front garden, the exact reflection of all the others along the cul-de-sac, go into the back room and pour himself a large whisky before sitting down to write. The glass would be steadily topped up as the pages filled up. In fairness, Ballard was also combating grief over the sudden death of his wife which had left him an isolated single father in an age when that wasn’t really the done thing, especially not for controversy courting writers determined to rub society’s face in its own vomit. Yet, as he produced the likes of Crash and the Atrocity Exhibition which smashed taboos aside, finding the unusual and the erotic in, for example, the mundane horror of car crashes, his undeniably uniquely inquisitive mind was being aided by drink.

And yet alcohol clearly isn’t always the most efficient way of achieving results. Take brandy. Proper, good brandy is a wonderful drink. All stickily burningly sharp, flavours that mug you and yet it gives an intense burst of endorphin fuelled energy where sleep becomes irrelevant. Whilst traditionally a French drink derived from wine, in 1900 many of the world’s most revered brandies came out of Georgia and Armenia. These routinely beat the leading French barrels in blind tasting in Paris and the Russian Tsar happily plundered his outlying provinces to amass one of history’s most enviable drink cellars at the Winter Palace.

In 1917, as the Communist revolution sacked the Palace they came across this immense store. All the booze was heartily attacked, but none as much as the much coveted brandy. So enthusiastic were the soldiers to get utterly fuck-eyed, that the revolution briefly ground to a halt whilst they wallowed in excess and toasted their future as free men and equals again and again until the lights dimmed on several days’ hedonism and little was left save for throbbing eyeballs in the morning sun.

Whilst Ballard dropped the whisky as either his grief diminished, or perhaps as Stone’s statement “when I was younger I was able to use hang-overs, but now I have to go to bed early” came true, Faulkner found it intruded further into his daily life. The binging at the end of a piece of work moved further and further forward, until it became at the heart of each piece. In his later writings you can see the heavy, clodden passages where his mind was soaked and his fingers couldn’t force the right words to appear on the page.

Maybe, in the end, beauty must fade and light must always fade to black.
Meanwhile, around the time that Babycham was being introduced to my life as a festive frivolity, I also began to be indulged in other mildly alcoholic treats.
Hot summer days were rewarded by kid-friendly cans of Panda Pop Shandy and Shandy Bass, both of which whilst minimally alcoholic in content did at least taste of sugary beer. I loved them. I’ve never been particularly partial to sweet sodas, and whilst the 0.5 or 1% proof pop was still laden down with glucose, it did at least have a genuine bittery tang too. ‘Made with real beer’ the Shandy Bass cans proudly proclaimed in marketing aimed at ten year olds and I, for one, was suckered.

From then on it was only a stuttering step to the next stage. Exactly when, again I’m not entirely sure when, but I suspect sometime before teenage years, I was permitted wine at family get-togethers. With the majority of my family living within a mile or so of each other, these were fairly frequent affairs and I was allowed a glass and then two and then three of white wine with the Sunday lunchtime meal we would have. This was sweet white, German wine. Not the sort of thing my palate particularly enjoys now, but, well, it was the eighties and the darkly smogged bottle of Black Tower was oddly alluring. It was definitely something properly alcoholic. I was doing something illicit, a thrill that buzzed with every sip. It was something adult; something real.

Jalal-al-Din Rumi, a Sufi mystic poet, wrote “before a garden, or a vine, or a grape existed in this world our souls were intoxicated with immortal wine.”

In the beginning, maybe that was where we came from, maybe that was how it all was.

Dry

2011-03-15T21:19:00.001Z

Let’s get one thing straight, right from the start: This is not about desire. I am not writing about necessity. It is not about addiction. It is not even about excess. This is not because I have to, but because I choose to.

New Year’s Day and I felt empty. I felt turned inside out. I had been slightly sick and I had horrific diarrhoea, the sort that flushes you through until all that is left is a hollow husk. Feeling drained, I had been unable to get up properly.
I’d done small things, like taken a shower, then been a little more ill and then needed to lie down to recuperate. As I lay somewhat feebly on my girlfriend’s sofa with my head on her lap and the burble of the television somewhere behind my closed eyelids, I felt embarrassed; embarrassed and guilty because I knew that my patheticness would mean that we failed to meet some of her friends. By the time I was confident there was nothing left to come, it was too late. By the time we arrived at the pub in Old Street they had already left and it was all my fault.

But, contrary your expectations, I did not have a hang-over.

Oh, all right. Maybe a little one. When I first awoke there was a dehydrated crinkle to my brain, but it faded quickly enough. I’d drunk a fair bit the night before, but not to excess. Not like I used to. I hadn’t felt drunk as we’d walked home through the damp shadowed streets of West London. I’d consumed probably less than I had on many a Friday night over the years after which I would have sprung out of bed with ease on a Saturday morning. No, honestly. I wasn’t. My stomach was still upset three days later.

But this isn’t about any of that. I’m just setting the context.

On the evening of New Year’s Day I cooked my girlfriend some dinner whilst she read the paper. The Guardian’s magazine was full of helpful advice about how to live a prosperous and healthy 2011. It was the usual pointedly appropriate mix of drink less, eat more healthily, do more exercise, make time for life rather than just work. One section discussed cutting down on our media, the never-ending ways in which we are plugged in the world. We should, it argued, make sure we are connected, but with how people really look as well as their profile pictures.

‘I gave up Facebook last year,’ she said. ‘It was surprisingly easy. I might do that again.’

Self-denial has never featured high up my list of ways to be entertained, but, without thinking, I said: ‘I wonder what I could give up.’

‘Beer,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘Or,’ she gave the matter some more consideration, ’alcohol generally?’

‘Now, let’s not be silly.’

But the more I thought about it, the more it appealed. I can be a contrary bugger at times and there was something about the social experiment aspect that would be interesting.

(Plus, you know, I need material for these things to come from somewhere. Ah, my life: Nothing but a vehicle for your entertainment.)

‘Yeah, right,’ guffawed my Kiwi friend, when I initially touted the idea. ‘You know what they say, David? Only those with a problem have to completely abstain.’

Yes, thank you, but this isn’t about problems. I do not have a problem with alcohol. I frequently don’t drink. I rarely drink during the day under any circumstances, simply because I find it difficult to then get anything else done. I don’t race home from the office craving a beer. I am not one of those people I see around, the woman in the power-dressed stripped business suit nipping at a hipflask as the seven-thirty morning commute train arrives in London Bridge, or the scabby guy with the burst blood vessels in his cheeks picking up cans of Strongbow Black when I collect my Observer from the newsagents early on a Sunday.

But I am a habitual drinker. Whilst it’s not as though I’m churning my way through four times the recommended limit every week, I do enjoy my drink. Going to the pub forms the foundation of my social activity. When I haven’t seen a friend for a while I always suggest we meet for a beer. I enjoy nice wine with a meal. I confess I do that thing which supposedly marks the alcoholic from the casual boozer - I drink alone. I take pleasure in a beer or a glass of wine or a whisky and water after an evening writing. Ultimately, my sub-conscious associates relaxing, down time, allowing space for my thoughts, chilling out, whatever you want to call it, it comes with an alcoholic drink.

But the thing is, these are all my choices. I know that I don’t have to do any of these things. I don’t have a physical yearning to imbibe? I don’t believe that I have a mental crux that makes social interaction impossible without lubrication. I don’t think I’d be bored if I didn’t drink.

Yet as I wrote about music and got on with life Lent got closer and closer and somewhere in the back of my mind I began to get slightly apprehensive: what would happen when I stopped drinking altogether? Would social occasions feel weird?
Would people look at me oddly, so defined am I with glass in hand? Would I simply hide away in my flat being somewhat boring? And crucially, for someone whose only non-alcoholic drinks of choice are ginger beer (but more than one these days gives me heartburn), tea, coffee and water, what the hell am I going to physically do with myself whilst those around me quaff till it dribbles out their ears?

I wrote the first draft of this blog on the first Sunday of Lent. The night before I went to a party. On paper it was one of those events where perhaps a drink or two might have eased things along slightly. A charity bash at my girlfriend’s parents’ place and whilst her family and friends are absolutely lovely and have made me feel welcome in their circles, I would still be surrounded by people I didn’t know that well. All of whom would be enjoying a drink. Somewhat to my surprise, it couldn’t have been easier. Time flowed on by and, although I found myself adrift and swollen with tap water whilst frequently having to politely decline her Father when he proffered the open wine bottle, the evening was thoroughly enjoyable.

The morning after, however, was weird. Initially everything was fine, but once in the shower I felt a ringing sting shoot through my head. As the afternoon wore on it dulled to a consistent throb, but even though I was five days sober I was the one with the headache the day after the party. At times life really isn’t fair.

Which left me to wonder, what will happen next? Will my much feared insomnia, fuelled by deep sleeps, late rises and too much caffeine return? Will I find myself suddenly much more productive or, as paradoxically I found trying to carve this blog out, lethargic in my writing? Leafing through my diary shows numerous events coming up where not drinking may be socially unacceptable, not least a stag do. Am I going to find myself shunned and ridiculed by a society where the consumption of alcohol, if not quite at the mythological levels splattered across the tabloids suggesting a high-street hell or Gomorrah Great Britain, is at least the common ground for most formal engagements?

Well, sod it. There’s only one way to find out. Keep dry and carry on.

Adventures in a record collection (part 6)

2011-03-02T23:01:00.005Z

Inside the marquee we found ourselves shielded from the sharply biting sunshine, but instead smothered by a tight sweat. Dust filled the air and then lay down on our damp skin. At the far end the band were playing up a storm: A thrashed electro-punk sound almost collapsing into an acid-jazz wig out as the singer catapulted himself around the stage with a sneer and the drummer pounded the skins like they were going to beat him to death.

We were there to see faux-Mississippi delta via Yorkshire blues men Gomez, but this spectacle was the warm-up act. The squawk faded into a mess of battered instruments and a final flourished kick of the microphone and stand, the tipping up of the drum kit and seeming ambivalent stalk off the stage. This was music as gestures, as statement of intent. Hell, it might even mean something.

‘That was amazing,’ my Kiwi friend gushed. ‘Who were they again?’

‘No idea,’ I replied somewhat staggered. All around us the same questions were being asked: Who? Where? What?

Later, with the aid of the internet I learned that they were from Los Angeles, they were called Funeral Party and nine months later the dice have thrown up their debut album, The Golden Age of Knowhere.

Ten years or so, an aspiring visual artist said to me something about needing to be successful now. Right this minute. The implication being that artists who didn’t make it young were never going to make it; only with youth would you have something new to say. With age you become more accepting of the establishment. Life, in the end, wears you down.

In this instance, they were explicitly referring to visual artists, but I think it’s something that could, maybe, be applied to all art forms. Certainly music, with the possible exceptions of jazz, classical and opera, would seem to suggest so.

Perhaps it’s just because so-called youngsters buy more music and are inclined to buy something made by people their own age. Were we more interested in elevating our peers to positions of grandeur because then it felt more feasible that we could do it too? David Baddiel thinks that there no more heroes to be found in the arts. He argues that an excessively large critique market means that the equivalent of Ezra Pound pointing out James Joyce was a genius will never happen again. There are too many people with access to an audience (ahem) who’ll poo-poo any such proclamation. But the young don’t really know this. They haven’t been saddled with too much expectation being dashed too often.

Perhaps youth also brings with it a bravery to be different, to be innovative, to throw fucking rule book out the window and play what you need to hear or say or make rather than just what needs to sell to cover your mortgage repayments and keep you stocked up with nice wine.

There’s a notion in music writing of the difficult second album syndrome. The idea that the incendiary debut is almost impossible to follow up because there are now fans with expectations to meet without just repeating the trick, there is a profile to adhere to. Oh, and because under pressure from those same fans and the traditional money end of the business the record needs to be written, recorded, produced and released in a year whilst still promoting the debut, and so the band don’t have the luxury of time that helped the first’s gestation. They don’t have the freedom to hone the new songs by performing them live and to write and rewrite. They just have to do it.

This lack of fear to make the shapes and sounds that rest in your head, I guess, was what my artist friend meant. Age brings caution.

Common consensus seems to suggest that writers are different. As a general rule, writers are expected to be older. They are supposed to use the benefit and experiences of the life they have lived to write new ones for everyone else. Maybe it is all a matter of perspective. Maybe the concept of youth just depends on which direction you’re looking in.

It’s an optimistic thought and feasible in that no-one ever talks about writers under twenty, do they? Granta’s best young British/American/Spanish writers’ issues are always popular and young always means those under forty. In the classic 1983 list all bar http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/19/fiction.kazuoishiguroand Adam Mars-Jones were older than I am now. A similar list in the New Yorker last year threw up only one. The Telegraph, copying the Americans blatantly, came up with their own list and only had Evie Wyld younger, although Ross Raisin was born the same year (Goldsmiths alumni both, by the way).

This is all reassuring. Sort of. As another rejection letter lands on the door mat, I can tell myself that there is still time to get it right. But sometimes it still feels like there’s so much stuff my head, so many scraps of notes and plot outlines and fragments of dialogue that I am simply running out of time to find people to read them.

Because writers are young too. For every David Abbott only coming to pick up a pen once life is mostly through there is someone like the hugely talented Amy Sackville who was just twenty-eight when the Stillpoint was published last year. Or Joshua Ferris who was thirty-three when Then We Came To The End persuaded me there was little point trying to write the perfect office experience novel because he’d just done it. He was the same age as when Ali Smith when Free Love and Other Stories came out. Ernest Hemingway was just twenty-seven when The Sun Also Rises was published and F. Scott Fitzgerald was just twenty-four when he held his first edition of This Side of Paradise. Neither of them had quite as much time as they may have expected. That’s the problem with life. You never quite know how long it’ll be.

Compared to the Arctic Monkeys being seventeen with a number one album they all seem positively ancient. Maybe it’s all about how old you feel.

You know what, I have no idea how old Funeral Party are. They might be in their late twenties or early thirties. They might not. It doesn’t really matter. In the end, it’s about the sound. My Kiwi friend and I went to see them again, making an active decision to check them out this time when they played Cargo in Shoreditch recently. Perhaps, forewarned they simply weren’t as surprising, but it didn’t feel quite the same.

As the crowd bounced and punched the claustrophobic air in the catacombs of the railway arches and the singer stared at his disjointed hand clutched the remains of the tambourine and said ‘I think I broke my thumb’, I glanced around and felt by far the oldest person there. Not because I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was. Not because I didn’t get airborne with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. I did. But because when they sang about revolution and changing of the world for the better through hedonism and ideals I couldn’t help but be objectively distant. They weren’t singing to me. They were singing to youth, to belief.

So, are Funeral Party going to be the next big thing? Are they heralding in a new era of music? Don’t be silly. Of course they’re not. They’re just a band. A good one, sure, but just a band. They do make a glorious racket, though.

Adventures in a record collection (part 5)

2011-02-22T19:51:00.004Z

This was a long time ago. Half a lifetime ago, in fact. Back when the world was somewhat different, but, in many ways, exactly the same. It was in the run up to the end of school. Not just the end of a school year, but GCSEs and the moment we’d walk out of the school doors for the very, very last time. The time of being isolated and miserable by puberty had passed. It was the point at which life could start properly.

On Radio 1, which still mattered then, Chris Evans was kicking the establishment away. We hadn’t quite figured out what a nob he was, but compared to the traditional Smashie and Nicie DJs he was a rebel. He was cool. No less than when he extolled us, the young and empowered, to buy a record, to buy a single that was new and exciting and dynamic about us and them and life and the perils of vanity. We had to buy this record to prevent the housewife’s favourites, TV actors Robson and Jerome, from sitting pretty at number one with their bland cover of Unchained Melody.

It seemed as though music that was something more vibrant than Australian soap stars or novelty pop records that reeked so vilely was gate-crashing its way into the mainstream. Bands with guitars and drums who sang about the things that mattered rather than death cults or Nazi memorabilia had arrived. Or returned. Or, to be strictly accurate, simply drifted onto our cultural radar, previously blinkered by childhood. Anyway, they were bands for whom it was cool to part with our hard-earned cash. Money we’d gained stacking shelves in supermarkets, swiping credit cards in petrol stations and humping sacks of compost around garden centres. And so we bought the record, but it still only made it to number two. The nice chaps, with the big smiles and the chiselled chins and the safe, unchallenging material, who were managed by Simon Cowell, had triumphed.

See, things change. And then again, they don’t.

The song? Pulp’s Common People and that record along with its parent album, Different Class, was the sound of coming of age.

Britpop was a media phrase, something to sum up what it meant for Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit to appear sprawling on the cover of Time Magazine endorsing Cool Britannia. It was a handy way to clunk together bands from the UK who played guitar, but it was ineffectively narrow. Pulp were never Britpop. They were never Menswear or Cast or Sleeper or the Bluetones or fucking Shed ‘we’re so cool we can piss on the floor of the Cardiff Student Union Bar’ Seven. Which isn’t to say I didn’t, at the time, like those bands. I did, for I was young and they were a genre that I could associate with. Something cool I actually liked, that made me part of a socially acceptable herd.

Sorry, but I was sixteen.

Yet, it was a fleeting thing. The majority of Britpop bands have faded. Their music was of that moment at the end of the century when for the first time in twenty-five years it seemed that youth might be worth living after all. In 2011, Blur’s Damon Alban seems to have turned himself into some sort of twenty-first century Renaissance man dabbling in everything from pop-hip-hop to dub and Chinese opera, keeping each new release interesting at least. The Manic Street Preachers are in some sort of late-period revival, Radiohead continue to hide in their own little bubble and Oasis have finally realised that they’re never going to write a song as good as Don’t Look Back in Anger and have, thankfully, gone away. And that’s it. All the others, the one-time new generation, have become the past and either given up or are hawking records on their own labels and playing gigs to nostalgic thirty-somethings.

But, Pulp? Pulp were always too smart to be real Britpop. Their music was informed by disco and the need to dance rather than to give surly nods of the head. They were from the North yet not blokish; they were a little bit cheeky but not from Essex. They had been together over ten years and were already in their thirties. They defied all the metrics that should have placed them in the Britpop camp, but still lazy journalists dumped them in there all the same.

Despite tunes that now feel irresistible, at sixteen I was still too morbidly self-conscious, still too concerned what anyone else thought about me, to swing my hips without serious inebriation greasing the way along. So whilst the music did have that physically buoyant lift to it, the real reason I feel hopelessly in love with this album was – oh, how delightfully teenage, how typically Holden Caulfield of me – the lyrics. Jarvis Cocker’s wry observations of mid-nineties Britain’s with all its shams and hidden perversions and delighted oblivions of sex and hedonism were eye-opening and, instantly, it was as though I’d been waiting for someone to explain so succulently how the world worked.

The belter of an opening song, Mis-shapes, summed up the teenager suburban experience perfectly: “Oh, we don’t look the same as you/We don’t do the thing you do/But we live round here too…/…the future’s owned by you and me…/…we want your homes/We want your lives/We want the things you won’t allow us/We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs/We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of/And that’s our minds.”
It’s about knowing you’re cleverer, more grounded to the masses than those in power with wealth. It’s about resentment. It’s about none of those things. It mocks anyone who thinks it might be.

Cocker sneered at society’s divisions and, in particular, the Britpop trend of slumming it in a safe way, of pretending to be down and out when the reality of a council estate would probably have terrified the members of Space. And in-between he took the album’s brain and gave it a heart, albeit a disturbed one. He mixed in hefty doses of confused sex. In Pencil Skirt, I Spy, Live Bed Show and Underwear he doesn’t sing about making love or wooing a girl, but about the sordidness of affairs, how to wield control in relationships and the way sex fades from love over time. At sixteen, I don’t think I really understood any of this, but was content to snigger then scowl when he warned “I’ve had your mother twice and now I’m working on your Dad” or “take your year in Provence and shove it up your arse.”

Indeed even the more conventional narratives are anything but: Disco 2000 is a tale of teenage romance unfulfilled and the lingering obsession preventing future relationships from being successful setting to a thrusting guitar that guarantees the dancer going airborne at the final “Oh let’s meet up…”. Something Changed is about two people ending together by chance and then being, possibly, too idle to change again; people smothered by the easy option.

Leaving aside Cocker’s particular perversions, the charting of society’s hypocrisies is the staple of much great music. Disillusionment with the norm, as we’ve previously discussed, pushes people into bands, but it also appears in the writings of great novelists. Sometimes they are young and sometimes they are looking back across life with the experience of years, but the scope of the novel allows deeper and broader examination of the world’s ills than a three minute pop song.

I think that when I first wanted to write this was the sort of thing that passed through my tiny brain. I wanted to change the world with words. I wanted to draw people’s attention to the flaws in society that only I could see.

Sorry, but I was sixteen.

Instead, I am, I think, on more solid ground with the twisted complexities of relationships. Of course, being currently unpublished, I am far from the great novelist I once daydreamed of being, rather than revise for my exams.

Charles Dickens, however, probably was a great novelist. I remain hesitant since I’ve always struggled slightly with Dickens' tomes, but it isn’t arguable that he carved an immensely successful career out of informing society of its forgotten children and the peril of the wealth divide. The myths he painted still hang over London. Dickens’ reportage, or his invented archetypes, have dug their way into the city’s fabric.

Evelyn Waugh played it more for laughs, but his humour was bitterly sharp and double-edged. Those lampooning were as fallible as the lampooned. George Orwell kept it straight, but even he corrupted his work by deliberately seeking out the scummiest, seediest elements to report upon. The scandalous misery he found amongst Wigan life was highlighted by the big authorial finger pointing down from the heavens.

Kingsley Amis kicked the class system in the nuts until it puked, but in Cocker’s lyrics little has changed since the days of Lucky Jim. It’s just been rebranded; people born to positions still sit at the top of the pile. And again, little changes sixteen years later.

In the twenty-first century writers such as JM Coetzze, Aleksander Hemon and Caryl Philips address similar issues. They offer less all-encompassing visions than, for example, Leo Tolstoy who tried to map the entirety of Imperial Russia’s inequities. Instead, they spike their target and take a piercing outsider’s view as they drift through life; seeing with clarity the puppet master’s strings of society that those on the inside can all too easily ignore. Their texts are elegant framings of the world, less trying to force change, but content to shine a great big searchlight on it and let the gaps speak for themselves.

Similarly, Different Class’s finest moment is in the gap between songs. At the frantic futility of the penultimate track’s “Now, now that you’re free, what are you going to be?...Is this the light of a new day dawning? A future bright that you can walk in? No, it’s just another Monday morning, you got to do it all over again” when the song’s energy collapse in on itself and from the burnt out ashes of dreams torn down by reality, Cocker turns and says: “Hey, you made it.” The world is crap. To borrow a phrase from another band, Modern Life is Rubbish, but once you realise that and once you find people who feel the same then you can start to rebuild. You can find the fights that are worth winning and change, at least, yourself for the better.

You can grow up.

Or just waggle your bottom at Michael Jackson.

Adventures in a record collection (part 4)

2011-02-15T21:35:00.003Z

The law of averages always meant I was going to roll dice and come up with a tricky one.

Which isn’t to say this is a bad album or even a remotely embarrassing one. Musically and lyrically it is sensational, it’s just that, well, maybe everything that could be said about Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On has already been said.

Gaye started his musical career as part of the Motown machine churning out lover-man ballads in the suburban Detroit studio basement owned by Berry Gordy. Motown’s plan to rule the American airwaves was going to plan and singer after singer, fuelled by the Funk Brothers tight grooves, laid down vocal s in the snakepit. Gaye was just another cog. His voice was just another instrument, no different to bass or drums.

It was just another way to tell stories about juvenile love and quickly forgotten heart-break that would appeal to the wallets of the young.

But it was his talent for duets that made him stand out. Big swelling, rhythm and soul numbers with lyrics that went to and fro declaring everlasting adoration for a succession of female partners propelled Gaye up the charts time and again and none so powerfully than as with Tammi Terrill.

When Terrill died of a brain haemorrhage in 1970, Gaye sank into a black depression. Already a surprisingly reserved man for a pop star (he hated performing live), he tumbled through a funk markedly different from the sort the band used to jam out. Demons chased his soul. His brother was in Vietnam. The murder of Martin Luther King and the subsequent riots in Chicago and Washington and Baltimore, Boston too were it not for only James Brown’s passionate performance keeping the crowds in the auditorium instead of out burning the streets down. All these wounds were raw. The USA was adrift and Gaye, depressed and confused, found its pulse.

I have no personal anecdotes to tell you about What’s Going On. It hasn’t intruded in my life in that way. The only thing I can think of is around the time, possibly even the same day, I first bought it and played it on repeat whilst stripping down my bedroom, preparing to leave the city at the end of University. Maybe that’s why. Maybe, somewhere in my subconscious, I automatically associate it with the end.

Influenced by the troubles around him, Gaye wrote a state of the nation address with a smooth funky back drop. His vocals are slick and yet catching on his heart at the same time. They soar over lush strings and swaggering bass that even today sounds the right side of dated. The emotions the record explores are complex; the narratives deep and far reaching, each song can touch the listener in a different way. It is both intensely personal and universal. And yet it was only released after protracted disagreement with Gordy who felt it was too political, missing the point that really the album is about Gaye’s grief for a world that wasn’t proving to be as wonderful as it had once promised.

In many ways, I think, this is the better way to write about real events, to make it personal and push the listener or reader or watcher to find themselves or the life they know in there too. William Skidelsky, writing in the Observer recently, bemoaned the abundance of films recreating real events: The King’s Speech, 127 Days, The Social Network, the upcoming Jack Kerouac biopic, Where the Road Ends. Or rather, to be more accurate, not that they exist, for vibrant insightful biography is a crucial part of our wider culture, but more he despaired at the instant and universal acclaim they seem to get. As though, by being truthful they are automatically more worthy than something which just makes shit up.

Whilst, I think they’re good films, he has got a point and it happens in literature as well. Indeed it can be traced all the way back to Shakespeare’s histories, political arse licking and spin doctoring each and everyone. But outside of violent regime change myth making, ever since Truman Capote’s toweringly brilliant In Cold Blood novelists seem to have been increasingly poaching narratives from real life, as though not having to concentrate so closely on plot will release them to explore the human dynamics. Simon Mawer in the Glass Room doesn’t have to worry about the setting for his narrative since he borrows a real Czech art deco house to place it. Jonthan Littell’s research heavy The Kindly Ones can focus on incidental detail without having to worry about the logistics of how the Nazis might lose the war. John Banville can focus on his characters’ failings in The Untouchable rather than whether their secrets will have to come out or not.

Okay, so it may not be as overt as in the films mentioned. Banville even changes the names involved (although we know it’s the Cambridge spies). They are all very admirable books, but somehow I can’t help but wonder if they’d have been even better with greater invention. Just going with the narrative flow; trusting the audience to have faith in the creator.

Besides, where does it stop? Capote’s experiences of writing In Cold Blood even became a film in their own right. Circles around and around constricting our knowledge and understanding spheres.

Yes, it’s important to examine these building blocks of our existence; these examples of the extremes of humanity’s triumphs and failings, coupled with the microcosm of self, there is much we can learn from them, but not at the expense of pure invention. The ability to conjure something out of nothing, to externalise our own individual concerns, hopes and failings into a mythic construct is a precious talent. It enables people to see beyond the simplistic, the straightforward narrative and to search out their own reflection from within.

After all, the reason that What’s Going On still sounds relevant forty years later is its lack of specifics. Urban strife, financial meltdown, ecological catastrophe, hopelessness in the soul of a country, distant war few want or understand? It could be tomorrow, couldn’t it?

Adventures in a record collection (part 3)

2011-02-08T21:44:00.005Z

Another London park; another hot summer afternoon only this time the sunshine comes after the morning’s thick clouds have been stirred away. Like the crassly spoken words that came too, they have crashed under their own weight, been eased to one side by the music and now all that remains is the dried up remnants in the air. Over the afternoon the music will crank up, build through stages towards the crescendo, but at that moment it was still preparing its ascent, still yawning in the golden light.

The main attraction was elsewhere, somewhere down by the bars and the cluster of people, just in sight of the main stage, easing back into the cracked grass to receive the tightly wrapped cigarette papers. I was among the outskirts. Just me and a couple of dozen other keen souls, entrapped by the stripped back sound of hard heels on wooden floors.

At the end of the set the two lead singers, sisters, came down amongst the crowd and autographed copies of their albums. I handed over seven quid for a copy of their debut and they duly scrawled their names on the front. I walked away starring down at its strangeness. Written in tight red biro, as though from a scratch, needled in between the half cut face of the artwork, it said: ‘To Dave, love Rachel and Becky’ as though it was a joint present from my sister and an ex-girlfriend.

The dice haven’t chosen that record. They’ve chosen the one which was the reason I was there in the first place: Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - The Bairns.

It’s another folk record, but a very English one. Or, to be more precise, a Northumbrian one. The songs resound with the north-east’s lost past. They echo a clichéd mix of abandoned mines, coasts where the wind could carry you out to sea or crash you against the footholds of a castle and gruff hardy types who like a drink and the things that are best left to the dark. In many ways, everything about them is deeply unfashionable. The girls in the group refreshing defy the televised notion of a female music star yet still there is something beguiling about the Unthank sisters. The flushed out toned down photography of Becky Unthank stiffly seated in what could be a corseted reinforced dress atop a renaissance chair reflects the music they make: Beautifully aching music filled with remote longing.

The album is filled with songs of domestic violence and lost virginities; stories woven with sex and the demons found in drink, all sweetly harmonised over piano, fiddle and the occasional rhythmic stomp. These are songs with subject matter timeless and sung in voices that sound like they come from beyond, but are simultaneously lush and hallowed so they could be either from above or below. They are mixture of whole songs and concocted lullabies, snippets of traditions caught on a dusty old tape on the final breath of the drunk in the corner by the fire.

The only girl group thing about them is that they mainly play cover versions. Or, to be more accurate, aside from two group compositions, one written for them and a cover of Bonnie Prince Billy, the rest are traditional folk songs arranged by the group. Reinterpretations of songs sung for generations, but not as radical reworkings as, for example, the Pogues did to Irish country music. The songs are still grounded, still sunk deep into the earth. Rather than gut, they remodel with craft, they restore glory. They inherit.

Indeed why should they feel the need to write new material? When the music is as rich, unexplored and deeply satisfying as this, there could well be no other songs ever crafted than the fifteen on this album. All music, in the end, derives from itself. It’s all just progression built upon what has been before, all the way back to sticks on stones in the dust.

Classical literature tradition also suggests that all narrative comes from itself.
After all, there are only seven truly original story types. Not plots, but pure story types: The Quest; Voyage and Return; the Rebirth; Comedy; Tragedy; Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches.

A touch simplistic? Well, maybe, and certainly comedy and tragedy are pretty wide spheres. Aristole defined comedy as showing people to be worse than they are and tragedy as showing them to be greater. PG Wodehouse’s books are called comedy not just because it is hilarious, but because they on focus Bertie Wooster’s failings, even though in doing so they accidentally reveal his strengths too. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is a tragedy because Valjean, when he strides through the barricades to catch the collapsing world, is more than we could ever hope to be.

But still, these are building blocks rather than absolutes. We can blend recipes to concoct new dimensions of the originals, yet the core remains. The irrefutables.
These are the parts of life worth writing about.

Let’s take some random examples from my bookshelves:

William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa may be very funny, but technically it’s a rebirth story – taking the central character as broken as they can possibly be and allowing that moment of epiphany when they start to return. Anne Enight’s The Gathering is a probably a tragedy, but it could also be a voyage and return. The family spreads far and wide and only stumbles home in mourning. Graham Greene’s the Power and the Glory is a quest for salvation. The whisky priest grapples with his own soul over that of his nation. Will Self’s Great Apes is an overcoming the monster tale, only in this instance is the beast within. Michael Chabon’s Kavlier and Clay, despite its flaws, is a rags to riches and back down to the gutter and finally up to the spires again story with doses of comedy and tragedy to boot.

Curiously, browsing through my books for this exercise I notice a couple of things. Is it just me or have rags to riches stories gone out of fashion in the Western world? Or, at least, outside of America? Is there so little mileage to be gained from people inching from one level of comfort to a slightly more squidgy version? Or have we decided that writing about wealth and the acquisition of it is nothing more than crass? I suspect that this is more a British embarrassment over discussing wealth. We’ve too much of a tendency to be equally jealous of those both above and below us, too focused on illusionary green grass, to consistently enjoy such stories.

I appear to own a prevalence of rebirth novels, which possibly reflects my own interests and writings. The novel that I can currently touting around is a rebirth of sorts. There’s certainly the crushing finality of realisation where we all went wrong. Or at least, I hope there is. The work that I’m trying to cultivate into something greater, an action that appears to be tragic in itself, is perhaps a mix of rebirth, voyage and return, rags to riches and overcoming the monster. Perhaps one will exert its dominance over the others, but which will only come clear in the writing of it.

Short stories are, perhaps, harder to categorise. Their brevity, their necessary focus on the moment, the turn, means that they struggle to take more than one story element and indeed there is insufficient space for enough emotional development to take on the entirety of, say, a quest story. All they can do is hint. Paradoxically bigger more complex works fit more easily into one of these silos.
But maybe that’s the big bluff. Maybe the complexities are just in our imaginations; what we expect from two hundred plus pages. Once you strip out the narrative twists, the self-consciously stylised imagery, the slight-of-hand literary thesis all we’re left with is the story. One of the seven moulds, waiting to be cast; to be turned into something new. Strangely, despite all the traditions bled into The Bairns, it is on the composition written especially for them that I found the most emotionally satisfying. Fareweel Regality is perfectly placed as the penultimate track. It follows on the back of the dusty wail for Ma Bonny Lad. There’s a half breath of a pause and then an almost, dare I say it, gleeful in its own melancholy fiddle strikes up before Rachel raises her head from the beaten ground and softly sings something new from something familiar.

Adventures in a record collection (part 2)

2011-01-31T20:50:00.005Z

The ground of Hyde Park was a loose brown that eased into the air; dust particles glinted in the afternoon sun that drifted across the horizon. From the far side of the barricades a grinding bass thud echoed under the soil and up the back of my calves.

‘Yeah, so we’re going in because David wants to see one of the support acts,’ my Kiwi friend trilled down her phone. ‘I don’t know, Gas-something.’

‘Gaslight Anthem,’ I said and glanced at my reflection in her oil slick aviators. I shimmered back at myself.

‘Gaslight Anthem. No, I’ve never heard of them either. They sound old though. Because David’s really old.’

‘Hey,’ I interrupted: ‘I’m only four years older than you.’

‘Whatever. Catch us up, okay? Laters.’

We made our way through the barriers and picked a path through the throngs sitting in the heat, letting the music wash into their sweat. Scuffed footsteps, those that tapped along to the beat, caused more dirt disturbance and already I could feel the clogging of my nostrils. The thick frantic drums throbbed along my breastbone behind the a brisk guitar that caught on the summer’s breath.

‘Hey,’ she said and turned to glance at me: ‘They’re actually quite good’

Seven months later in the biting chill of my flat, the Gaslight Anthem’s second album, The ’59 Sound, is chosen by the dice.

I don’t remember how I got into the Gaslight Anthem. This album just seemed to appear in my collection. I don’t remember buying it nor the first time I listened to it, but it must have been sometime before Easter 2009. That weekend, I picked Architect-Steve up to drive to Snowdonia for some hiking. The rattling chains of guitars pelted out of the stereo until, after a while, Steve said:

‘I haven’t heard music like this for a while.’

‘Music like what?’

‘I think I’m getting too old for angry young men with guitars.’

But a lot of great music has been made my angry young men with guitars desperate to change the world. It’s the classic route of rebellion from the late fifties to the future. It is fuelled by the accessibility of the guitar, the band-as-a-gang structure inspiring people to riff on how they’d rule the world to get the girl and step out from the shadow of the dreaded adulthood they’d imagined. The band, at least in a youngster’s eyes, is the opposite of their parents' choices.

In the band, you never need truly grow up.

Punky Springsteen is the easiest way to describe the Gaslight Anthem. They sound a little like a twenty-first century version, which would have been a coincidence with last week’s entry, although frontman Brian Fallon claims that he’d didn’t really listened to the Boss until after forging his own band’s sound. He claims a greater inspiration from Joe Strummer. A song from a different album is called I’da Called You Woody, Joe, an allusion to the Clash singer's earlier pseudonym which, I guess, works well for those who like links under the lines.

The comparison with Springsteen’s sound whilst accurate is also lazy. Sure, the Gaslight Anthem roar tales of suburban heartbreak and heroes in the Boss’ hometown of New Jersey, but where Bruce’s music has a soaring sickly epic haze to it, a arc of relentless inevitability, confident in its own grandeur, the Gaslight’s racket is more ramshackle and seemingly accidental. The guitars are quicker, more soaked with the late seventies, and the characters are more beat-up, desperate and hopeless. Ordinary Joes failing at life without the romanticism that everything can be redeemed by the open road. It’s never going to get better than bearable for the ciphers packed into these songs where triumph is the refrain “ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night” and Fallon groans like the trouble is sinking deep into his guts: “See, I been here these twenty-eight years, pounding sweat beneath these wheels, we tattooed lines beneath our skin.”

Twenty-eight? Pah. It’s absurd and yet, I believe him when he says enough is enough.

‘I love their lyrics,’ said my Kiwi friend bopping gently under the open sky.

‘Yeah, this one’s great,’ I replied as they ripped into the next number. ‘A song of broken hearts, sailors down on the damp docks getting new tattoos, broken down iron framed American cars and no way out.’

‘Yup, check, check and check. All clichés presents and correct.’

But there’s a reason why clichés are as such. They really do ring true. And that familiarity allows you to know what the rules of the game are. There’s an argument, maybe, for writers having a consistency of voice and theme that allows the reader to know in whose hands they are placing their need to be entertained. I don’t mean rewriting the same dross over and over, but crafting something that reeks with the author, something that reflects identities.

Graham Greene’s characters are, in the main, parts of each other. They change over the course of his career, but they are nearly all haunted by lost love with a penchant for whisky, a struggle for the normality of marriage and a willingness to visit brothels; their principles are flooded with emotional swelling that thrases against their otherwise pragmatic nature and then there's the never ending shiver of unrealised Catholic guilt. Querry from A Burnt Out Case could well be a worn down Bendix from the End of the Affair; Farnworth in England Made Me could grow into Brown from the Comedians or maybe even Fowler in the Quiet American. If things had ended differently, it isn’t that hard to see Scobie from The Heart of the Matter growing blindly into Forntum in The Honorary Consul.

And, anyway, aren’t they all just exhalations of the author? Just bits of himself that Greene expelled and breathed back to life on the page?

Recovering alcoholic, Raymond Carver, whose wife was crucial in his survival, writes of broken down drunks, almost always in retrospect and with a hinted mixture of regret and longing. His characters swill through heartbreak, their love crying out to be rescued or rescue from the tedium of life, but all that remains is the descent into numbness. That single reason to exist – the last escape.

Ernest Hemingway, Martin Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, JG Ballard, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal... They all do it. Their works are all stuffed with narrators and characters who you can't help but think you've met somewhere before.

I wonder whether my own characters and stories are beginning to have this consistency. The misfits who populate my writings are almost certainly going to be some sort of emotional crisis, or complexity – an interaction between their former, current or potential lover that doesn’t quite fit the norm. They like a drink. Perhaps too much. They are frequently based in, but rarely from, London. They may be weighed down by their middle-classness or struggling in having to come to terms with the surprising end of youth. Is this bad writing or does it give me a solid base from which to deviate? Is what I’ve previously claimed to be laziness in inventing detail instead cementing a control from which the story can be spun in any which way I choose?

It is, however, important to remember that whilst these may be my characters’ obsessions they are not all of me. Greene’s characters are clearly infused with who he was, but it doesn’t mean they are complete representations. Despite the parallels it is a mistake to read his work as a direct confession. All the writers above, whilst almost certainly possessing the male vanity need to fictionalise the self by inventing shit up to show off, don't get away with it that easily. So if in the end it is all made up, then there are still reasons for the shroud.

As The Gaslight Anthem point out to us, on Here’s Looking At You, Kid, the things we say always have a reason; the lies layered in our fiction suggest something else. The characters are just that – caricatures. The real is more mundane. Or, just occasionally, more exciting.

“You can tell Gail if she calls,
Tell her… That I’m famous for all these rock and roll songs.
And even if that’s a lie
She should’ve given me a try.”

Adventures in a record collection (part 1).

2011-01-25T20:22:00.010Z

I am, although it pains me to admit it, somewhat stuck. I find myself wedged between different projects. Above me, pressing down with a frustrated heaviness is what looks suspiciously like a finished manuscript for a novel, which I am slowly sending out to agents and wincing when I come home from work to find the inevitable ‘thanks, but no thanks’ compliment slip on the bottom step. To either side like gobby yoofs on the evening train are half a dozen aborted short stories that were never going anywhere interesting. And pushing up from underneath my feet, fearful of being trampled all over, I seem to have the fledging shoots of something else: An idea.

It is an idea that’s been rattling around my head for a few years and found its missing heart in the summer of 2009, right when I was pounding the keyboard in full flight for that probably completed manuscript that scowls at me every time I fire up the computer. At the time I was too busy to work on it and so scraps of notes went in the ‘ideas’ folder. That tends to be how it goes, I guess. Productivity equals more stuff being produced, like a chain reaction of fictional ideas.

So, on one hand I’ve been hanging out with these new people for a long time. On the other, they’re like strangers. Or more like celebrities. People I know superficial things about, their publicised highlights, but I’ve been sat down next to them at a dinner party (in some weird universe) and now I’m nervously trying to understand the real them. It takes time for they are sensitive souls and prone to going into a silent sulk if I press to hard.

In other words, I’m writing as though my fingers were coated in lead. Very, very slowly.

Still, I think to myself, productivity equals more stuff. Perhaps I should be more consciously trying to reboot the chain reaction. Perhaps it is time to return to the blog.

Except… Except… Ngh. I can’t think of anything to say! I don’t even have many stories of bizarre London roaming to recount, or none that I want to share anyway. Sorry.

And yet, this was the original idea for the blog. Its original function was to be a way to kick start my brain into putting words down on paper.

So: Emergency conversation piece one-oh-one. Music.

Let’s write something about music. Let’s write something about music I love. Let’s write something about music I love and how it feeds into my writing. I think I may be slightly unusual in that I almost always, except when close editing, write to music. Lavinia Greenlaw says that, despite being obsessed with music, she can’t create with it on; that she needs to hear the poetic rhythms of her prose in her head. I’m not that sort of writer. I’m probably not that good a writer, but regardless even when I have turned the stereo off the songs just play on as shadowy remnants of tunes heard earlier. Choosing the right record, setting the right tone, has become part of my preparation.

So, let’s write about that.

Except that’s a bit easy. Let’s make it harder. Okay, you up for this? I’m going to choose a record at random and try and find something interesting to say about it. I am going to roll three dice. One determines the record stack in my flat, the second the shelf of that stack, the third the number of CDs in from the left.

(This could be really painfully embarrassing).

Huh. Interesting. Okay, there’s something I can say about Billy Bragg and Wilco: Mermaid Avenue.

This is a slightly unusual album in that British folk/protest singer Billy Bragg was invited by American folk legend Woody Guthrie’s daughter to record songs using some of her father’s unused lyrics set to contemporary music. Mermaid Avenue was where Guthrie lived in Brooklyn during the late forties and again ten years later when his career was all but over. The fact that the record is named after where he went to die might tell us quite a lot.

Guthrie was a principled recording artist in the thirties, frequently touting a guitar with the motto ‘This machine kills fascists’ either etched into the wood, or marked on a sticker and attached. He wrote Americana folk songs, including ‘This Land is our Land’, and broken ballads that drifted out of the dust bowl and dumped dried dirt into your ears. He lived a self-stylised hobo life criss-crossing the country, daringly associating with communists and somehow being both patriotic and disruptive to the state. But by the fifties he was barely able to play guitar, his coordination so wrecked by motor neuron problems. For twenty years he suffered from undiagnosed Huntingdon’s disease, variously being labelled as an alcoholic or a schizophrenic and the frustration at the unfairness of life was taken out on two wives who were eventually driven away (although the first returned to help him to the end).

By the time fan Bob Dylan tracked Guthrie down in the mid-sixties he was described as having ‘good and bad days’. There were days when he would talk enthusiastically to Dylan about music and messages and days when he wouldn’t understand what was happening to him. He eventually died in 1967 a echo of himself and outside of folk circles his influence waned. In the mid-nineties Nora Guthrie saw Billy Bragg, the bard of Barking, performing at a festival and invited him to record the project.

Daunted at having to reinterpret a hero’s musical legacy, Bragg called in alt-Country band Wilco and former 10,000 Maniacs vocalist, Natalie Merchant, to help soak up some of the emotion. Whilst they were to fall out over the project– Wilco’s bassist felt Bragg’s songs were overproduced – it is still a startling record; a concept album not about something but fuelled by something, by someone.

Whilst grounded in fairly safe folk-rock territory, the record oscillates between jocular rambunctiousness and woeful heartbreak. There are boisterous hints at seediness in Walt Whitman’s niece; heartbreaking simplicity in Birds and Ships; older-man perverseness over Ingrid Bergman; slightly sarcasm in Christ for President. Jeff Tweedy’s vocal on At my Window Sad and Lonely sounds like the last gasps of desperation over deceptively simple guitar barely in the same room. The fun almost rockabilly of Guess I Planted contrasts with the, again, meditative frustration at being locked out of your talent as age catches up in One by One.

It’s an album recorded in flushed out black and white, where the blacks are actually a faded brown, like tea stained paper or whisky, and the whites are nothing but mist.

As a (wannabe) writer I like the idea of trying to harness the ghost of someone else, an idol or a hero. The new piece that I’m playing with has a noir tinge to it, but also the hero is plagued with guilt. I am playing in the Graham Greene sandpit, taking everyone to a reimagining of Greeneland and I’m well aware of it. I'm challenging myself to wrestle down the enigma of Greene and funnel out words so utterly poised as his. It seems pretty unlikely, though. I’m not good enough.

When I take the mood of music, I often have a scene where the track plays through my fingers. It’s like in a film or a TV programme, there’s a soundtrack and often no-one’s saying anything, but it’s just a tracking shot establish mood. But because there is no soundtrack to words on paper, I have to try and convey that same mood through the tone and phrasing.

Years ago, I planned a short story which in my head featured a song from Mermaid Avenue, Way Over Yonder in a Minor Way, playing over, for want of a better phrase, the story’s credits. The point, at the end, when the written phrase pans out and the soundtrack starts. Sometimes I see my stories visually and then have to grapple how to put them into words. This was one of those occasions.

It is a marvellous song. Deceptively simply lyrics create a sense of yearning for something that never was. Bragg’s voice cracks with the ironic self-championing ‘ain’t nobody that can sing like me.’ It’s nothing to do with the tone or the tunefulness or even the soul of the voice. It was about Guthrie’s beliefs. The heart-felt intention not the delivery was what mattered and Bragg infuses it with a near mournful retrospective of a life’s disappointments.

This was in the spring of 2007. Tony Blair had yet to leave office, but it was becoming increasingly obvious he was going. I wondered how it must have felt to be one of those in ninety-seven who’d flooded him into power, who’d hung onto the coat-tails expected the revolution that never came. Would they feel betrayed? And the war was inescapable. How could they justify all the deaths to themselves? I played around with the idea of a civil servant, or a party member; someone at the heart of things and, now that it was over, they were left empty and drained and a useful nothing husk of man.

Consigned to failure.

This final scene would have had the protagonist shaking hands with someone and then walking away as the autumn leaves drifted down and the camera panned out and up into the sky, over the way in a minor way. I never did write that story. To an extent it was overshadowed by the final image. I couldn’t find the words to cram in the space of what I wanted to say, the bitter longing to try again. The rest of it never quite came together, but the final scene still sits in the ‘ideas’ file and whenever I hear that album it pops up in my mind.

Perhaps some day I’ll be able to find all the right things to say about regrets and how the past could have been; how the opportunities were missed and how life has a way of making it impossible to much other than life in the moment. Don’t put things off that you could do today for you might be incapable of doing them tomorrow.

Until then I’ll have this record to say it for me.

Or, as Tweedy gets to sing on Another Man’s Done Gone:
‘Maybe, if I hadn’t of seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people’s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone.’

Cold Front

2010-11-26T17:32:00.002Z

Part of the British caricature is that we’re obsessed by the weather. Perhaps it’s because we simply can’t cope with it. As the long months of grinding disruption and endless panic-mongering news coverage proved at the beginning of the year, reinforced by the announcement I heard at London Bridge station on a freakishly oppressive May evening that the trains were delayed due to “today’s extreme heat”, unless it’s grey sludge filled skies occasionally breaking to form resignedly sardonic sunlight which just can’t manage. We fall apart.

I fit the stereotype of British and like many a German newspaper cartoon (probably). I watch the weather forecast with intense interest. I wasn’t always like this. In years gone by, I wouldn’t have cared what each new day brought, but recently I am watching out for one thing in particular: the temperature. Or, to be more precise, how cold it’s going to get.

September 2008:

I arrived outside the converted Edwardian house with some trepidation. The whole exercise of flat hunting was proving to be demoralising. Already functioning in some sort of squewed daze where my surface activity seemed smooth enough yet underneath there was a scorched soul, I was becoming increasingly dismayed that the crashing property buying market had sent the rental market into orbit. I was reduced to scrounging around at the bottom of the studio/bedsit flat price-range where friendly rats were seen as a bonus. I paused before ringing the doorbell trying to bury my preconceptions that it would be as bad as all the others I’d seen; the ones where the mould in the kitchen smirked at you; where the toilet slumped seedily away from the wall; where if I stood in the centre, stretched my arms out and rotated gently my fingers would brush all four damp walls; where missing floorboards had scratched at my ankles.

I went upstairs.

It was… surprisingly nice. In fact, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It was clean, relatively spacious and had kitchen appliances.

I took it.

November 2010:

The heat caught at the back of my throat and teased the moisture out of me. It weighed heavy on my neck. Sweat prickled my neck. A solitary blob of – what? Sweat, snot or tear I wasn’t sure which? – slide across the rim of my nose, paused for a second at the tip, dangling into the dragging space before spiralling into the air. It never hit the tiles at my feet; instead it disappears into nothing. The tiles baked. They were too hot for anything other than the cracked backs on my heels. I felt a mess compared to the Hungarians I shared the sauna with. Their bodies glistened whilst mine was matted in thick wiry hair. My feet left deposits of grated white dead skin, their steps left only the faintest damp impression.

I slumped forwards; my forearms creased my thighs; my shoulders hunched. It was the sort of heat that breaks you. My jaw slipped and hung open. My eyes rolled in their sockets. The man next to me slapped his breast like his heart fluttered.

The air warped. It was unstable, incapable of balance. I could barely make out the clock on the wall, it blured with the thermometer. The red mercury nudged at seventy Celsius. I had only been in there seven minutes. It felt like forever.

November 2008:

I sat in my new, mildly cramped flat and let the six o’clock news wash over me. The television was on, but I wasn’t watching it. I ate my reheated dinner from days before and tried not think about having a drink. Something felt wrong. I felt… cold?

‘An unseasonable coating of the white stuff,’ said the BBC London weather man. You know, the irritatingly smug one whom most sane people could cheerily drown.

I looked out of the back window into the small garden. A shallow layer of snow settled and the air was filled with flaked chill. It looked like an unwritten memory of a CS Lewis’ story. Pretty, delicate, sinister. It felt cold.
Here’s the thing: I don’t typically get cold. Often, I’m too hot. I seem to maintain an internal furnace that pumps out surplus coal fired heat to keep me warm, to such a point that in late November I hadn’t even investigated my new home’s central heating system.

Which, as it turned out, it didn’t have. Instead, it was equipped with a single wall mounted heated with no thermostat and a single on/off switch.

I turned it on. A pale red light flipped up in the corner. I wandered away and when, thirty minutes, later I still shivered came back and put my hand on the cool plastic cover. I held my hands above it the open grill at the top and felt the gentle waft of heat flump out of the system with all the force of a dying puppy’s breath.

It felt like the world was ending. Surprisingly, it appeared that the apocalypse would not bring fire, brimstone, the scattering of machine gun fire nor the white exhaust of uncontrolled rockets, but icy tendrils that refused to let go, the vacuum of the disappearing banking system, Sarah Palin’s very existence, Haitian floods dragging 500 to the depths, gunmen trawling through Mumbai, and the breaking of waves off the coast of Somalia towards the oil tankers. I was cold and I didn’t understand why.

Unfortunately, the heater turned out to not be broken just crap and the temperature dive proved to the start of a cold snap.

December 2008:

I put a second jumper on and began to think about it logically. When the boiler had broken the Christmas before I hadn’t been so cold, so consistently. But that had been a terraced house sucking in warmth off the neighbours. I was in a studio flat within a converted house; a single room that jutted out the back of the building to be exposed on three walls, the fourth leading to the communal, unheated, staircase. Above me there wasn’t a loft cavity, but the roof triangulated with the shape of the old tiles. Below me, the back room of the ground floor flat was rarely used. I was totally exposed to the weather.

I borrowed a thermometer off my parents. A marble block of a paperweight with a heat sensitive strip across it. Not the most sophisticated piece of equipment, but it would do. It had a minimum temperature of 10 degrees. When I placed it on my desk it showed nothing.

I switched the heater on.

Three hours later it had crept up to 11 Celsius.

January 2009:

I borrowed one of my folk’s old hot water bottles and started to wear hiking socks in bed. I had never, even under canvass, worn more than boxers and a t-shirt before but I considered wearing combats and a jumper. Eventually, I decided that the restrictive cling of the extra clothes would make me lose sleep. Besides, it might get even colder.

And then the weather broke.

By February the sun returned if only to add a fuzzled hue to the room, a smattering of hope for what might come. By April, I knew I would again be claustrophobically hot in the cattle cart morning trains, my cheek pressed roughly against the vibrating glass enroute to the city centre.

March 2009:

The world hadn’t ended, so instead I started to write a story. A story about all the shittiest things I could think of. A story set in an endless thumping summer heat; a story where the cold I’d just escaped was a distant loss mourned for.

April 2009:

Ian Tomlinson died of still undetermined causes and a police officer without identity flashes bashed the face off a woman protestor during the G20 protests. In true twenty-first century style both events were caught on camera and played again and again on Channel 4 until the snarl of the copper as his open fist whipped across her face became embedded in my brain. His fury and disdain were inescapable.

I started rewriting early notes of late scenes for what would become my novel. I took out the parts that had already happened. If it was on the news, it wasn’t bad enough.

In July, whilst I went to Derbyshire for a week, the person I shared an office with arranged for the air conditioning to be switched off so that by midday of the day I returned droplets of sweat ran down my stomach and I felt mildly sick. In August torrential summer showers highlighted a different problem – namely that my bathroom window had a tendency to leak in particularly angled heavy rain which meant more than one evening swabbing out.

And yet, I liked my flat. It was compact, but it was starting to resemble something almost homely. I rearranged the furniture and it felt calmer. It had been a particularly cold winter, I reasoned. The relentless biting cold had been partially self-induced: I’d been unwell, an exhausted husk whose insides had been brittle like fine glass approaching sonic testing. I still couldn’t rescue all my books from my Dad’s storage facility, so they were left behind the coded security gates a West Midlands field, but, you know, it was okay. Besides, where else would I go?

November 2010:

The icy pitch almost stopped my heart. It shivered across my skin like a Flanders’ gas from 1917. My head broke the surface with a gasp for stolen air and the baroque marbled tiles of Budapest’s Turkish baths looked like angel’s clouds. This cold bit, but then, as I pulled myself out of the pool, it was gone and the fugged warm air like a towel caressed my shoulders once again.

I padded outside, where the late November sky was pitch black like my swimming trunks. All around yellowing walls, more akin to those of a palace, enveloped a sequence of pools. The air scratched with chill, but above the waters lingered steam like a haunted morning mist with nowhere to go. In the pools heads bobbed, their bodies safely secured deep in the 40 degree waters. The cold was dismissed by the warmest bath. The perfect calm floating bliss enforced tranquillity.

There are two sorts of cold. There is the short, sharp snap. The sort that makes your spine curl but only for a moment because then it passes. Then there is Russian cold. The sort of cold that gets inside your bones and rots you from within. The relentless crushing chill that doesn't give up.

December 2009:

It got fucking cold and stayed that way.

That second winter was the coldest for over thirty years; temperatures plummeted as the snow packed down and refused to bugger off. Grit shortages, transport network collapse, men trapped in remote Scottish lighthouses contemplating eating their dogs for Christmas lunch dominated the news and in one small, south-east London flat the air inside turned that pale grey it does when there’s ice in it.

In no particular order, I winced getting into bed when the frozen sheets touched my skin; I ran boiling hot water to do the washing up because my hands could take the scald; the flannel left on the side of the basin never dried; my olive oil froze, forming lumpy dispirited lumps like in a lava lamp; I lay in bed and watched my steamed breath snake up to the roof; when I switched my computer on it grumbled grouchily as it ground the gathered chill off its fans; my mirror steamed up whenever I boiled the kettle; I had to squat above the toilet, the icy porcelain being too much to bear; I wore fingerless gloves to type and the nubs of my digits went numb as they pounded the keyboard as I deliberately bashed it hard to try and keep the blood pounding.

This time, it definitely wasn’t me. I’d stopped drinking quadruple whiskies as standard. I’d started a regime of sit ups, press up and weights every evening. Although it didn’t last, I felt fitter and healthier than in years. Just cold. And winter lasted a long time.

Imagine waking up to feel the duvet like a child’s corpse hugging your shoulders; coffee from the filter poured out cold yet the hot plate still burning your fingers; an endless flush of goose-pimples snaking around your breast once the shower warmth had faded. That was my winter.

May 2010:

Dave slipped his tongue inside Cleggy’s mouth in the gardens of Downing Street for the waiting media’s delight whilst good ol’Gordie Brown’s lifeless husk hung from a coiled light fitting.

Sort of. It made me shiver anyway.

November 2010:

The cold is coming. VAT rises, benefits cuts, teachers reduced to mere weeks of training, university fees to cripple future generations forever, a fucking happiness indicator to see how seriously we’re pissed off, McDonalds and Pepsi writing obesity guidelines, forests being sold to the cheekiest developer to add to their land-bank for a decade until it becomes worth something again, fucking bastard big arsed society replacing gainful employment, aircraft carriers no-one wants without planes to land on them, Ireland imploding and sucking everyone else in just for the craig of it, the dream of a green economy just another broken lie, the country’s infrastructure built up on fragile legs of straw isn’t having concrete supports cast but rather the big bad Gideon shaped wolf huffs and puffs and the whole lot comes caving down on our penniless heads.

I sympathise with the students who’re cold in their kettle and so burn their placards and a bus shelters, beat the crap out of a police van and Milbank house to keep their circulation going. The country is getting angry again which may be good, but it’s too late. School children march against police riot vans, small girls in blazers and ties face up to plastic masked body armoured hard men and “I made it all up, but it came true anyway,” rings in my head. I can’t remember who wrote that, but it spooks me.

The cold is coming. There is nowhere else to stay for the winter.

And it will be long and hard.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bike

2010-10-28T23:02:00.003+01:00

Late October:

The light had that pale washed out morning feel to it, as though it couldn’t quite be bothered to wake up properly. The grey clouds congregated above the hills and down by the waters, in the shadows of the neo-gothic damn towers, the rain settled a slight sheen onto our cagoules.

Well, my internal monologue helpfully pointed out, six months ago you never would have imagined being here.

Early June:

First date conversations are difficult to get right. There’s a fine balance to hold between not letting the talk drop into awkward silence and – if you’re me– not relentlessly babbling from nervousness until something utterly inappropriate slips out. But that evening it all felt rather easy. The narration sustained itself naturally without any need for repetition, hesitation or deviation.

Well, at least until she said: ‘Have you got a bike?’

By this point I’d already established that she was a keen cyclist – the hefty panniers stashed under the table had been one of the give-aways – but I liked her lot none-the-less. Unfortunately the question felt like a stepping stone into chatting about bikes and cycling.

Fuck.

‘Not at the moment,’ I replied truthfully.

‘Oh. Why not?’ she asked before I could finish diverting the subject.

Fair question, I thought.

‘Um, to be honest, it’s been a little while since I’ve ridden,’ which was technically true as well, ‘but the main reason is that my flat’s really tiny.’ And with that more or less honest explanation I veered us into a discussion about homesteads before I accidentally cornered myself with a complete untruth.

Fifteen years previously:

I sat on the back steps of the mini-bus as the others swooped in off the Lake District hillsides; their faces splattered with mud and their grins smeared wide. Whilst I would never have said so, I was slightly jealous to have been left behind. Again.

‘I can’t believe you don’t know how,’ someone might have said.

‘Never learnt,’ I shrugged.

‘But it’s easy.’ And so for the umpteenth time I was cajoled into sitting atop a narrow metal frame in a car park. ‘You just need to try harder.’

I did. I tried really hard. I lifted my left leg up and pushed down on the pedal; my right foot had barely escaped the tarmac before I tilted to the left and landed down in an oily puddle entangled with the bicycle.

‘What is the point in learning to ride a bike aged sixteen?’ I grumbled from the floor, using spite to hide my shame. ‘I’ll be able to drive soon.’

Late June:

I sat down in the Battersea pub, my face flushed from an afternoon’s Greenwich sun.

‘I think…’ I trailed off and bit my lip, apprehensive at the enormity of what I was putting myself up for. ‘I think I might need to learn to ride a bike.’

‘Oh, really?’ replied Google-Steve and his face lit up. He likes a challenge.

Late October:

My friends had gathered themselves from around the country to the centre of the Peak District on a drab October morning. I worried that I might let them down. I worried that I wasn’t ready; that I wouldn’t be able to do what was expected of me.

‘How far is it again?’

John looked at the map on the information point. ‘Er, about twenty-six miles.’

Oh God, I thought.

Late July:

‘So,’ I straddled Steph’s bike whilst sunshine blessed itself upon Stratford Racecourse, ‘where’s the ignition on this thing?’

My audience chuckled appreciatively, but they didn’t realise quite how scared I was.

That’s right, my internal monologue chipped in, make stupid jokes. That’ll hide the crushing disappointment when you can’t do this.

Shut up, I told it. I don’t like not being able to do things. I tend to avoid, to circumnavigate, the difficult. I was afraid of failure.

‘Just give it a go,’ said Google-Steve.

‘Except, that’s kind of the point,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘Okay, well push down on your right foot, give the pedal an almighty shove and then… Well… I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s kind of instinctive. You just ride.’

So I did. I went about six inches before the wobble dragged my foot back down to earth. The innate need to be balanced was overpowering.

‘Okay,’ Google-Steve scratched his chin. ‘Perhaps we better start with the basics.’

And so he got me skirting along without using the pedals, trying to get a feel for the balance of the bike. He explained the physics of taking off and gaining momentum and yet, despite the fact I desperately wanted to succeed, the voice in my head kept telling me to stop wasting my time.

‘At work,’ he said ‘there’s an email conversation by Dads about how the best way to teach their kids to ride a bike. I wonder if I could ask for tips in teaching my thirty-one year old friend.’

I slumped over the handlebars, sweat from stress and anxiety (if not actual physical exertion) stained through my pale t-shirt. I managed to raise a sarcastic eyebrow, but no words came.

‘Why the sudden urgency anyway, Dave?’ asked Steph.

I went back to the beginning and explained the whole thing, stressing that strictly speaking I’d been honest throughout. ‘But now, bloody Boris has launched this bike hire scheme and I’m not sure how long I can keep the ruse up without being exposed.’

‘You have to tell her,’ gushed Lucy. ‘It’s so romantic.’

‘Or alternatively,’ chimed in John ‘a desperate attempt to dig yourself out of a hole of your own making.’

The most excruciating thing wasn’t the bad jokes and scorn of my friends (I was used to them), but the puzzled stares from children. Children who sat on bikes.

Children who sat on bikes and then rode said bikes along without the aid of a friend running along behind holding them upright by the saddle pole.

Eventually, as perspiration streamed down my brow the blood from the gouged flesh on the backs on my calves seeped into the tops of my socks, I realised that Google-Steve was running, not behind me, but alongside me.

‘Keep going,’ he shouted. ‘Keep looking straight ahead and pedal like hell.’

I was doing it. I was actually riding a bike. Albeit at just above walking pace, but it felt amazing. Yah-boo defeatist internal doubts, I thought. And promptly crashed into the plastic barriers that form the edges of the racetrack.

‘Ouch,’ I said from down on the grass, underneath a mountain bike. ‘That didn’t actually hurt after all.’

Huh, my internal monologue was surprised. Perhaps there wasn’t so much to be afraid of, after all.

Early August:

The months flowed past briskly. We went to galleries and restaurants and pubs and parks sharing each others London. Long warm afternoons became entangled with life as we peeled back the layers of who we were; prying and revealing in equal measure and still I didn’t say anything.

Yet bikes seemed to be everywhere that summer. I started to take more notice of people and how they rode. The lycra clad men who tucked their elbows in and hunched up into themselves. The daintily poised ladies who sat bolt upright and whose legs moved at a singular pace. The transient cool types who couldn’t wear a helmet for fear of their hair. Those who found it second nature and those whose wobble suggested it was harder than they remembered.

The Barclay’s branded terminals sprang up around central London. Ports without vessels, they haunted my future. Time was running out.

Late October:

The rain lashed down more enthusiastically as Architect Steve finally turned up and we set off. We took a couple of laps of the car park to warm up and then launched ourselves towards the steep ascent.

The others powered their way up easily enough, but I felt the hill winning.

‘Ngah,’ I grunted, but it was insufficient and two-thirds of the way up my foot came down and the bike stalled.

This is going to be fun, the voice in my head adopted sarcasm for a change. And it’s such a delightful day.

At least I didn’t fall off, I reassured myself.

Mid August:

‘And turn here,’ Google-Steve jogged across the Hyde Park grass, squatted momentarily and slapped the ground. I leant into the racing curve and missed the bruise he’d made, but not by much.

‘Right,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to run and zig-zag as fast as I can. Try and follow my line as closely as you can. But try not to hit me.’ And in an instant he shifted gear and accelerated away.

For a moment my feet wheeled in the air before I remembered to change gear, but even then I struggled to catch Google-Steve. He could run than I could cycle. My embarrassment was distracted though as I careered straight into a low-hanging branch.

‘Ow.’

I pushed on as hard as I could and for a second it felt like I might catch him before he broke left. I turned to follow and nearly span out of control. Nearly, but not actually. I recovered and made the turn.

‘You know,’ I called, ‘this must look pretty strange.’ I nodded to the couple walking along the path eyeing us suspiciously.

‘Yeah, this guy stole my bike and now he keeps chasing me.’

Late August:

As we walked through the back streets of Pimlico, between Tate Modern and Hyde Park, we passed an immaculate line of Boris bikes. Still sparkling and new their metal hides glinted in the sunshine. They were neatly aligned, like riderless cavalry horses at the water trough.

‘I don’t think they look too bad,’ she said. ‘You should register and we could go for a ride.’

‘Um,’ I scratched the back of my head. ‘I should probably make a confession.’

Later she told me her immediate thought was: ‘I wonder if he’s going to tell me about that blog I found?’

I stepped closer to her, ran my hands along her forearms and stopped at her elbows.

‘You know how I said I hadn’t ridden in a while? Well it’s been fifteen years really.’

‘Oh.’

‘And you know how I said I didn’t have room for a bike, well you know that’s true, but the real reason I don’t own a bike is that fifteen years ago I was trying and failing to ride.’ She looked a little confused. ‘I can’t actually ride a bike.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I’m learning.’ And I went into great detail about Google-Steve’s training programme and the progress I appeared to be slowly making, before concluding with: ‘And I can ride upright on my own now, although my control is still a little random.’

There was a pause and I held my breath.

‘That is so sweet.’

Phew.

Late October:

As the day wore on I started to catch myself doing things instinctively. Minutes would roll by and I would realise that I’d been distantly gazing at the view rather than agonising over staying upright. And just for a short while, the clouds broke and the sun peeked out, yawed its lazy way across the valley and all was beautiful.

Late August:

The Pembrokeshire coast gently soaked up the wind at the bottom of the cliffs as I rode in circles around the tents.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Beagle. ‘Dave Marston riding a bike. That’s something I never thought I see.’

I grinned and accelerated across the field, stretching my legs out to let the momentum carry me until out of sight behind a Landrover, a gust of breeze caught me at an odd angle and the ensuing wobble veered me off course towards a bush.
Still lacking complete control there, my less than optimistic voice reminded me.

Early September:

‘We’re just going to ride around for an hour or so,’ said Google-Steve as we mounted up on the edge of Battersea Park. ‘No-one can stay that tense forever.’

Off we went doing laps of the park building up endurance. Plod-plod I went as joggers and small girls undertook us, but Google-Steve just patiently wheeled along.

‘Just keep looking where you want to go. You’re doing great.’

We rounded the corner on the approach down to the river. Chanting berobed people clustered around the giant golden Buddha in his veranda.

‘Don’t look at the hippies, don’t look at the hippies.’

I looked.

Late October:

The air rushed past me on the descent. It flooded into my lungs and made me feel alive. That sensation of being airborne, of gliding almost out of control yet just a tweak would tame the momentum was triumphant. I took the corner at the bottom in a sweeping controlled arc and I felt like I could do whatever I wanted.

Until, moving almost faster than I could see, Google-Steve overtook me.

You’ve a way to go yet, moaned my internal monologue and whilst I agreed with it, I didn’t mind. It was going to be great fun.

With thanks to everyone who supported my biking adventure, but especially Google-Steve, patience of a saint.

Dear, John.

2010-10-12T21:51:00.001+01:00

It was an unseasonably bright Saturday morning when I disembarked the tube at St John’s Wood and wandered down the road reading the Guardian magazine as I went. I ambled along, chuckling at reading about Blake Morrison’s, experiences of fatherhood, zipping my way in-between the elderly men in long black gowns exiting the synagogue and feeling oddly comfortable in West London.

I glanced up from the page as the road curved into Abbey Road and discovered I was centimetres away from tipping a tripod, with a rather expensive video camera atop it, over. The pristinely blonde American woman with overstated make-up standing on a crate on the other side looked even more surprised than I felt.

‘What the-?’ I muttered and evading the obstacle with a deft hip twist. The road was more packed that usual by bodies of all ages congregating around the graffiti mauled white walls outside the famous recording studio. A tall woman, dressed all in black with an amply displayed cleavage, appeared to by trying to capture both her breasts and the peace rocket symbol etched into the wooden gate in the same photo with her mobile phone. Numerous middle-aged men in colourful smocks, fake moustaches and thin round spectacles pretending to be with Sgt Pepper posed, in front of the paint fraying white scraped walls, for pictures with people far too young to remember.

One of the play-actors rather spoiled the illusion by fiddling with his Blackberry.

It was Saturday the 9th of October, 2010. John Lennon, had he survived the four bullets Mark Chapman put in his back, would have been seventy.

A young man, with a fashionable woollen t-shirt, undone to his breastbone, said: ‘Let’s do the crossing.’

‘It’s the wrong crossing,’ I thought. He meant the zebra crossing from the cover of the Beatles penultimate/final (depending on whether you’re going with recording or release dates) is a couple of hundred metres further up the road. The crossing directly outside the recording studio had to be added to accommodate the volume of tourists swooping down the hill from the tube station and straight across the road.
Tch.

All these people, the thousands of them crossing Abbey Road in a stern faced line, are living a fiction. I doubt John would mind. He spent most of his life doing the same thing; being made-up.

On the cover of Abbey Road he is at the front of group, in a white suit and sandals, his hair flowing wildly out of control, his beard nestling its way down his chin and neck. He was in his heroin withdrawal, bed-in peace activist stage and his then shocking get-up was designed to provoke as much as anything else. He’d come a long way from the slightly chubby faced young man looking down the central stair-case on the cover of Please, Please Me.

That cover was reprinted for the so-called Red Album, the first collection of their singles, and replicated for its companion the Blue Album when the older band posed in the same positions. These were the first Beatles records I encountered as a small boy in amongst my parent’s collection. I didn’t understand until years later that they were the same people. It seemed impossible. And I was right. The Lennon on the cover of the Red Album is real; the older one is made-up.

He’s invented by John Lennon.

Curiously, in the final picture of John, the one snapped on the street with the sweatily fat Chapman in the background, he looked like he did when he was young. His hair is short and curly; he wears a black leather jacket over a black shirt and dark glasses. He could be back in Hamburg. He looks like he fleetingly recognised himself.

In 2010, despite having been dead for thirty years, John Lennon is an omnipresent piece of Western culture. He’s been taken far beyond Lennon the man, and become something more. He’s been pulled into the limits of fiction. His whole life has been applied to screen: his childhood in Nowhere Boy; his late teens, early twenties in Backbeat; lord knows how much film footage of his band; his early middle age in The Two Of Us; even his death. He crops up as a supporting character in numerous books, although possibly my favourite is in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles where he appears as the God of LSD.

Had he lived, I wonder which way would his career have gone? Would he have continued to plod out dross in the way the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney or would he have had a difficult couple of decades before finally releasing acclaimed albums that speculate on death and age in the way Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Johnny Cash and, to a lesser extent, David Bowie have done?

It’s impossible to know for sure and we’re not helped by the fact that Lennon’s output was already so confusing. He veered from the oblique lyrics of Happiness is a Warm Gun or Everybody’s Got Something To Hide (except me and my monkey) to the simplistically flawed philosophies of Imagine and Working Class Hero. He was the same writer who somehow managed to dredge up on the most mournfully nostalgic trawls with In My Life and also the gibberish of Revolution Number Nine; the sickly smush of Darling Boy and the startling self-aware confessionals of Mother and Jealous Guy.

Contrary bastard.

He was the peace activist who bullied his band mates and was an utter shit to his best friend, Stuart Sutcliffe, and then tore himself to shreds with recriminations when Sutcliffe died. He beat up women journalists and yet wailed about injustices in Vietnam. He doted on Sean Lennon to exception; he ignored Julian Lennon to such an extent that McCartney wrote Hey Jude to cheer him up. He was the man who preached love as a way to be free and serially cheated on his first wife in meaningless affairs. Even Yoko, the so-called love of his life, he humiliated by loudly fucking another woman at a party whilst she made small talk with the guests. His notorious eighteen month lost weekend was spent with May Pang, Ono’s assistant.

He took pot to cut down his drinking, acid to cut down his anger, heroin to pull back from melting his brain and then drank himself into oblivion. He really couldn’t do anything by halves.

And all these contradictions are the differences between Lennon the man and Lennon the cultural icon. He was an angry young man; a womaniser with guilt who was morally shredded by his own urge to be famous and the subsequent impotency that bought. These are flaws, but they make him more real. You can’t imagine an X-Factor winner having such cracked and cavernous depths.

Indeed, I suspect that, despite the humongous piles of words written about him, no-one really knew John Lennon. Not even himself.

When the Beatles Rock Band playstation game (or whatever the heck it is) Yoko said that John would have loved it. Would he? Or would he have just been confused by it? Or would it just be another case of him being reinvented as someone else once again?

There are a staggering number of memorials all over the world to John Lennon. There are those that just about make sense like John Lennon airport and then there are those that are weird: The Imagine towers in Reykjavik; a statue in Palermo, in Havana, several in Spain, a bust in Sopron music school in Hungary. But they’re not to Lennon then man; they’re to the Lennon whose trendy counter-culturisms and made young men envious. They’re monuments to the flawed emotions his music helped us to see inside ourselves.

And was that what Mark Chapman realised? That the forty-year old who’d just signed the copy of Double Fantasy wasn’t the near revolutionary of ten years previously, but rather a middle-aged man who’d spent half a decade raising his son and nothing else? Was it that failure to live up to the myth that drove Chapman to return to the Dakota Building, call out “Mr Lennon,” and draw his pistol?

Or, was he just jealous of all the bands that only existed because of Lennon; the Catcher in the Rye accusations of fakery nothing but a cover for the realisation that he could never define culture in the same way?

The death of John Lennon the man is a tragedy. The death of John Lennon the icon was a blessing – as he fell to the ground, he became immortal. He never got to let us down again. As time rolled on our vision of him became like we were looking through his broken and smeared spectacles and his failings fell to the wayside. His story remained finite, except in our imaginations.

Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t miss him, though.

Brockley

2010-08-31T22:04:00.003+01:00

At the start of the 1979 film, Manhattan, Woody Allen narrates different prospective openings to a novel the character he’s playing is supposed to be writing whilst a montage of city images rolls across the screen. Like most of Allen’s leads it’s just a variation on himself and so the film’s Woody’s novel’s Woody loves Manhattan in so many different ways, some of which are understandably affectionate, some are reflections of neurotic insecurities about anonymity, and yet he can’t find exactly the right words to express himself. Everything feels a little inadequate, insufficient as the opening to a story.

I know how he feels.

Unusually, when I started this series of blogs I had a clear idea of where I wanted it to go. But then, it was only an idea so I suppose it doesn’t matter so much that it turned out to be wrong. After all, it’s been a busy few weeks. A lot’s happened. More than I expected.

I sat at my desk one sweaty evening recently writing words about Whitechapel when my mobile rang. I glanced at the display, and one of the genius things about mobile phones is that knowing who is calling enables you to answers appropriately. In this case it was my ex-girlfriend: ‘Hey,’ I said.

We exchanged the required pleasantries, got cut off, tried to ring each other back simultaneously, and eventually established she was calling because she was on a train arriving in Brockley in a few moments. An old friend, who now lives abroad, was in town and my ex was meeting her for a drink and wondered if I’d like to join them.

‘But you don’t have to.’

‘Oh, I’d like to,’ I replied. ‘But I’m out a lot this week and was planning on writing all tonight.’

‘Well, it’s up to you.’

‘Tell you what: I’ll crack on and, if I can, I’ll pop down later.’

The call ended and I went back to my typing. I stuttered out a couple of sentences, but kept finding myself picking up and holding the phone. I quite fancied going to the bar. I didn’t particularly want to see my ex-girlfriend. The last time we’d met had been a ridiculously forced affair, although in fairness we both had other things on our minds, and I was supposed to be writing, but I really wanted to catch up with the visiting friend.

I wrote some more. I paced around the flat. A few more lines appeared on the white screen.

‘Fuck it,’ I said to myself an hour or so later and walked out of my flat.

As I walked along Wickham Road I could have been visited by any number of memories, such as the time we wheeled an old tea chest packed with crockery down the street, from the house we’d temporarily stashed it in, to our new flat, underneath a belting July sun and bickering the whole way until I said something too grouchy and she stormed off. Or any of the times I’d visited her in halls of residence. In particular, one of the first winter evenings whilst she talked on the public phone in the stairwell I rested my brow on the first floor window and looked out into the night. I saw the actor David Haigh walking down the street. I was new to London, then. I didn’t realise how it worked, that a minor celebrity could be spotted anywhere, especially if it was near where they lived. Or how it used be our route to play badminton at the school halls, or to rent videos from the much missed Homeview, or a sunny afternoon on Hilly Fields, or any number of other things that made life tick by. But these were not necessarily moments of dramatic tension worthy of note. They were just stuff. Just life.

Besides, I didn’t see any of those things. Mainly because Brockley is my home and whilst I love it from Rivolli Ball Rooms down to the Toad’s Mouth Café, from One Tree Hill church to the local butcher, I also let it slip into the background. And also because my mind was filled with thoughts of someone else. Somewhere else.

I realise that during the course of writing this series that the physical movement of the walk I was supposed to be crafting seems to have stopped several entries ago; indeed in the parts where it all got closer to home. And that’s because it didn’t happen. Well, it sort of did. I did walk from Dalston to Brockley following the stretch of the East London line, but I didn’t do it alone and rather than a soul searching historical analysis of the city, it was actually a pub crawl that effectively terminated in the Amersham Arms in New Cross. What? Did you really think my thought process followed what’s written down here? Do you think I’m totally mad? I made it up. That’s what I do. That’s kind of the point. Stuff happens and I turn it into something else.

‘Aren’t you bored of London yet?’ asked my friend Ben who now lives in Singapore, but was in town last week for a work trip. For a change we’d gone to the pub. I must have looked slightly baffled for he continued: ‘I mean, when I came to leave, I’d just had enough of it. The bustle and the thrust and endless congestion of people. Don’t you yearn for some space?’

‘Nah. The city is like an extra friend. One that’s familiar and comfortable and yet still, after a decade, surprises me.’ For example, I’ll tell you although I forgot to tell him, just the other week when I was pacing the streets and mulling over a few ideas and I decided to cut through Nunhead cemetery, just down the road from Brockley. I must have gone past the gates hundreds of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever walked through. I’ve certainly never found the charred stone remains of the chapel at its heart, half-reclaimed by the undergrowth, brittle against the gin clear sky. It was beautiful, like discovering a hidden tribe’s legacy.

‘I’ve been reading your blog. I would have thought there isn’t much left to surprise you.’

‘But that’s just a portion of East London. I’ve just discovered there’s a whole Western half of the city with its own stories and histories to blend with my own.’

I arrived in the bar to find a gaggle of people, some of whom I hadn’t seen for a long time and some I’d never met before. After the necessary cheek kissing and skirmished introductions I went for a drink. On the way, I paused just for a second and glanced around. It hadn’t changed. Pale wood panels still adorned the walls, ranks of empty wine bottles still perched on the skirting, each with a tale to tell, fairy lights still drooped across the windows, the scratched wooden tables surrounded by rickety wooden stools that shouldn’t be able to hold my weight, the Rolling Stones still played on the tapedeck. Some things are timeless.

‘All right, Steve?’ said the landlord. I was impressed that, despite the fact I hadn’t been in for almost two years, he still managed to misremember my name. ‘What can I get you?’

‘Something cold.’ And I wafted my shirt to indicate it was hot.

‘They’re all cold,’ he smiled.

‘Yeah, I guess they are. I’ll have a Budvar.’

Whilst he fixed my drink he made small talk: ‘Been some time since we’ve seen you.’

‘Uh, yeah. I guess it has.’

‘You moved away, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, only down the other end of Brockely. Down by the…down…’ but I trailed off because he had glanced, slightly confusedly, at our table and I realised that he’d the same conversation with my ex-girlfriend and that she’s told him that she now lives in Hackney. ‘Down by the station.’

‘Oh. Three pound ten, please.’

I handed over my money slightly relieved that he’d reverted to business and not forced any further explanation. But then, I guess he’d be used to discretion. I remember hearing him talk, a few years ago, about running his bar and how he liked it that people used drinking holes to fix points in their relationships. He’d seen people on first dates, proposals being made and rejected, couples fracturing apart, friends leaving and children coming home at long last. Tears and smiles for all manner of reasons, and over a drink it all seemed a little easier.

I took my beer back to the table, sat down and enjoyed myself.

Back in Dalston, I suggested that I’d developed a sense of being the star of my own movie as some kind of armour; a protective shield against being swallowed up by reality. But the more closely I look, I realise this isn’t true. It isn’t something I’ve consciously and artificially constructed. It is how I’ve grown up and I hadn’t noticed until now.

It’s just me.

And, so, yeah, in that case I guess I may be occasionally arrogant and cocky and relentlessly sarcastic and frequently prepared to find inappropriate humour. And, yes, I’ve done some bad things. I’ve told some lies I regret, I've looked the other way at the wrong time and I’ve used people. Sometimes in ways you would expect and sometimes I’ve taken people and stuck them in my writing because I am so vain and self-obsessed as to think that people will find my own life utterly fascinating. And sometimes I feel guilty about these things, but, let’s be honest, if I wasn’t fascinated by my own life I’d be a pretty fucking depressed individual. If I wasn’t convinced that people would want to know what I have to say, then what would be the point?

My new girlfriend and I lay side by side under the sunshine of Greenwich Park, deep beneath meadow curled grass, at a time when she probably wasn’t quite my girlfriend nor me her boyfriend. Just yet. For reasons I can’t remember, we were discussing random foods we’d eaten.

‘And there was this barbecued ghost,’ she said and then corrected herself: ‘Goat. Barbecued goat.’

‘I quite like idea of barbecued ghost,’ I smiled.

‘It’d be somewhat insubstantial.’

And that’s not only a good gag, but a great point. We do all have ghosts that we carry around in the backs of our minds; spirits and memories that highlight the decisions we’ve taken and where we’ve come from. “Just ghosts,” to borrow a Laura Marling lyric “that broke my heart before I met you.” Or ghosts of fictions once read, friends lost touch with, jobs you hated, songs you loved, life it all its muddled, coincidental, evil bastardised, glory. I find that mine are vividly bound to places because a physical place can swamp the senses so entirely in sight and smell and sound. Cities and landscapes have no choice other than to be emotive, but the ghosts don’t have to be a weight. They are, by their very definition, insubstantial things of thought. They help make up who we are, but it’s up to us who we become.

Tch. There, you see? Arrogance. Holding forth opinions on the big picture; encouraging layers of meaning when there needn’t be any. This blog doesn’t have a big reveal or a point. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t need to. I could, I suppose, make something out of coincidences, such as on the way home from the day job this very evening, as the train pulled in Brockley station, I finished reading Francis Spufford’s new sort-of novel, Red Plenty. In the acknowledgements, which I’d skimmed from New Cross, Francis thanks the School of Slavic and Eastern European Studies at the University of London. A website somewhere lists the contact number for this organisation as my work direct line.

‘Uh, we’ve got a delegation of Slovenians coming to a drinks reception and wondered if you might be able to tell us how to say “Cheers!”?’

‘Kockyofski,’ I smirked, childishly.

But it is just a coincidence. It’s nothing significant. It’s just stuff happening. It’s just life. We all, occasionally, look o hard for things when in reality it’s like Edwyn Collins sang on the hidden track for his much underrated Gorgeous George album, “The music only makes you higher if you’re a moron and that’s what’s bothering me.” Or as Britpop also-rans Mansun said at the end of the fairly mediocre Attack of the Grey Lantern: “The lyrics aren’t supposed to mean that much, they’re only there to give a human touch.”

They’re only words, after all.

Later on one of those moments cropped up when someone’s at the bar, someone’s in the toilet, someone’s outside having a cigarette or trying to call their boyfriend and suddenly I realised the only ones at the table were me and my ex-girlfriend.

‘How's your work going?’ I asked.

‘I hear you’re seeing someone,’ she replied.

‘Uh, yeah,’ I tried not to instinctively smile in case it came across as smug or something rather than just an automatic reaction whenever I think about my new girlfriend. ‘I am. She’s lovely.’

At the end of Manhattan the too young girl says something that expects a response and all Woody can do is look into the camera with a half smile and a raised eyebrow and we’re left to fill in the blanks for ourselves. Because if he said anything, then it’d been an ending and only stories have endings. This isn’t a story about stories, his eyes say, but a story about real life and real life, even when it’s shrouded by a story, doesn’t have an ending and this seems as good a place as any to simply stop.

New Cross and Gate

2010-08-27T21:06:00.002+01:00

When I was a small boy I wanted to be a soldier. Not, you understand, because I was particularly compliant in following instructions, or because I craved physicality, or even because I was in any way brave. No, it was because I believed the films I watched and the comics I read whereby the mavericks and the unruly and those who refused to do it by the book for the sake of their men won out in the end. In the same way, as the years inched by with the mind numbing grind of puberty, I wanted to be a racing car driver, a spy, to be in a band. I wanted to at the centre of attention. I wanted to be a hero in my own rebellion.

Almost ten years ago, the rickety old East London carriages – poor relations of their newly air conditioned cousins – tumbled along the tracks. I stood by the door, my body rocking uneasily as yet unused to the train’s rhythm; electric blue sparks fizzed up from the railings against the windows in the way that they always used to even when it hadn’t been raining. The rucksack on my back was heavy in a reassuringly permanent way; the bag over my arm contained my first ever suits. I felt like I was grown up, heading out into the big world. I felt as though my story was turning.

The train terminated and the doors grumbled open. It was the middle of a Sunday afternoon and so the station was what I would now describe as quiet, but then still seemed to be busy. People slouched hurriedly, the ice cream van graveyard behind the razor wire fence glinted in the summer sunlight, up above the traffic inched along the road filled with resentment. Welcome to your life, I thought. Welcome to New Cross.

That was all a long time ago, of course, and when I walked out of Surrey Quays it was many years later and half a mile further north. The Woodpecker Estate that sits along the borders is, apparently, notorious. It is the home of one of South East London’s more vicious gangs. And yet on a sunny Saturday afternoon it was hard to fathom. Low rise town houses and small apartment blocks with banks of grass and properties hidden behind trees and bushes and roads named after seventh century Frankish kings from a time before France was France, rather than spiked tower blocks and darkened gantries cornered by blind spots where the CCTV can’t stretch. It could almost be anywhere.

‘God, I didn’t mean places like that,’ chimes the memory of the man from South West London. And he’s right, I guess. It’s all about familiarity. The spaces around New Cross bring forth memories such as wandering through the park towards Deptford with a hangover split asunder by searing sunlight and the screech of kids on mini-cycles and yet the charm of a feverantly contested cricket match overrode all. As I closed my eyes I heard cheap imitation willow thwacking against a tennis ball not the rapidly fired pistol shots that cut down the Polish nurse who’d wandered into a dealer’s arguments on the same day as I started my masters at Goldsmith’s. The incessant sirens that drowned out our tutorial were a source of minor irritation or perhaps amusement, without the realisation that a woman lay on the tarmac with her life escaping. Nor do I think of the French students tortured to death for their credit card numbers by a psycho who later tried to escape this grandmother’s Brockley Edwardian townhouse through the fourth floor skylight, but of the beginning of another year and watching London be doused in glittering red, blue and green from atop Telegraph Hill.

When I exited the station a decade prior, I can’t remember which pub would have been on the opposite side of the road. Now, it’s the Hobgoblin. Another student friendly chain pub. Once upon a time, it would have been the Rose, a pub I’d studied the exterior of extensively on one of my first visits down to New Cross when my then girlfriend arranged to meet me at the station. She was almost two hours late leaving me to stand on the grey damp street corner, under the orange hue of the streetlight, letting the traffic flush up mucky rainwater. I watched people go in and out of the pub enviously. Aside from anything else I quite needed a wee. But in those pre-mobile phone days deviating from the arrangements could bring more difficulties than it solved.

It was probably a good thing I didn’t sneak in for a crafty pint. I was later to hear rumours that on match days Millwall fans would lurk by the windows, hidden by the off colour glass, and watch for opposition fans to arrive at the station. Upon spying their target they would rush out and tip the surprised supporter off the bridge and onto the tracks below, before disappearing back into the pub’s conspiracy of silence.

Typical New Cross. It’s rather fond of its fucked-up pubs and so am I. There are probably stories to tell for all of them, but, alas, I don’t really have the space. In the far west stands the madness that is the Montague Arms, a pub with almost certainly the world’s most insane décor, from the human skeleton behind the bar via the penny farthings and muskets randomly affixed to the wall and the scattered steel buckets to catch the rain seeping through the ceiling to the centrepiece of an embalmed zebra riding in the back of horse drawn carriage all under brothel red lighting. The exterior signage encourages coach parties enroute to and from Dover to drop in. Lord knows what continental visitors think, even if Paul McCartney did, accordingly to local legend, once pop in to see the mad house and end up playing some songs on the rickety stage.

Next is the establishment sometimes known as the White Hare which changes hands pretty frequently and still no-one goes in. For a while, last year, it was a lapdancing bar. Now it’s just a non-descript bar sitting on the corner where once the gate to the city was and now is deep in the centre of wider London.

Then, where the road forks into the one-way loop that I’ve spent far too many hours stuck in, there’s the holy trinity of the New Cross Inn, the Marquis of Granberry and the Goldsmith’s Tavern, once known simply as the GMT. The New Cross Inn was always the safest, blandest one of the three with the best bands playing late at night legally. The other two were never that concerned by licensing laws. Once, I was the Marquis’ first paying customer at eleven on a Monday morning, but more frequently I could be found there on a Friday night failing to hustle for the pool table, propping up the bar acting thirty years older than my twenty-two, trying to translate my midland-northern hybrid ways to the big city. The jukebox would always play Sinatra late on, and the Pogues and then White Shade of Pale giving last orders the maudalin send off it deserved before the lights went out and the music quietened down as the doors were bolted but the customers stayed inside with the pink cheeked landlord with his wrist permanently bandaged and outside the gun shots shattered the burger bar’s glass and the sirens raced down the main road and yet no-one bothered us.

The GMT was hairier. Once upon a time, it only got busy after everywhere else had closed up from exhaustion. Once you’d bustled past the bouncer in the leathers with the face tattoos and the pierced knuckles, the light inside was so appalling that you’d never be able to tell what you were drinking. The windows were ninety percent covered over by plywood and yet still a brick would sometimes come through the ten percent exposed. For a while I knew a girl who worked behind the bar who would return change more than she’d been given supported by an exaggerated wink and yet no-one gave a fuck. There were nominally three rooms. The main bar where most crammed sweatily in, a sticky floored back space with a single set of amateur disco lights and the mixdesk that played music you’d only heard in your dreams. There was a snug too, but as the only way to reach it seemed to be through the gents it only attracted a certain mix of people.

That was then, though. These days it’s clinically clean with bright windows and the world’s blandest Italian resturant upstairs. Not that I’ve ever been, but it’s just not right. It bears the name the GMT but passes no resemblance. It’s too safe.
At least the Venue is reassuringly still a cesspool. It stands imposingly on the main road with its plain concrete exterior bearing down on the cluster of drunks in the street. And at two o’clock in the morning people spill bleeding and vomiting into the path of traffic or lurch uncoordinatedly at the bus stop a white glaze to their eyes. I once met someone who thought it was the best club in London because it was the only one where “you’re guaranteed a fight.”

Charming.

I do my drinking in New Cross these days in the Amersham Arms. The Amersham spruced itself up just before my Masters. Occasionally confused former locals still find themselves standing in the middle of the bar wondering where all the wrapped tight jeans, stripy tops and student haircuts appeared from. All the rest of it, despite it still being there, it all seems like a long, long time ago.

Not as long as ago as when the first V2 dropped down outside Woolworths and killed thirty-four people. I’ve always found the incidental Woolworths detail strange about that story, as though it passes some comment on the people who died. They were shopping in Woolworths. It’s an Iceland now and above it is, allegedly, a rat infested postgraduate halls of residence. An Iceland and a library that never seems to open. No, not that long ago, but long enough for me to feel old. Old and tired. And yet New Cross seems to keep on being young.

It has a youth and vigour that gets reinvented by a influx of new students determined to live up to the Britart and Blur heritage, but with each year that passes and for each umpteenth time New Cross and Deptford are touted as the new Shoreditch, the new Hoxton they seem to get a little more stale. A touch more sterile. They still look uber-cool. When I did my Masters there you could pick out the undergraduate art students from a hundred paces, but New Cross doesn’t need to be the new Hoxton. The old one’s just up the line now, anyway. Let it just be New Cross.

Back ten years ago, I walked out the station and crossed the thronging road towards my girlfriend’s student digs where I would live for the final few weeks of her tenancy. It was a flat within in a mansion block on the southern side of the Old Kent Road. It was a flat of vibrations where the front windows rattled from the continual crawl of traffic outside and the back shuddered every morning as the old routemasters in the bus depot warmed their weary engines for an hour before the day’s work began. A beautiful building hemmed in by relentless carbon monoxide.

My ex–girlfriend keeps appearing in these, doesn’t she? It’s not entirely surprising – ‘How long!’ people will often exclaim – but when I started this journey I fully expected her to be screeching loudly by the time I reached New Cross because all through these memories she lurks. From the time I staggered down the New Cross Road from Deptford at the end of my first week at work, pissed on only five pints and a youngsters inexperience of drinking on an empty stomach, to the guy who used to be always found on late night buses chewing his food so vigorously that great lumps of tinged saliva would flump out across the air or from buying cans of Stella at the old Duke’s Taxis for an outrageous price under the counter with the girl who later threw herself in the Thames, to the “skunk-weed-whiz” guys who used to lurk in the alley between the park and the main road and who appeared late night on my television screen for some fly on the wall cop doucdrama being approached by mini-skirted girls with fairy wings whom I’d last seen slurping lager off the table at the Rosemary Branch. And yet as I walked by way down from Dalston she actually became quieter. She faded somewhat into the background.

When I was a youngster I wanted to be a rebel without a cause; an outsider; the lead in the drama in my head. Perhaps I didn’t have to do it in a blaze of gunshots or a screech of tyres echoing the heroes of my childhood. Perhaps I could do it by just being me. Perhaps it would be sufficient to just save my own world, rather than everyone’s. Perhaps we’re all doing it, all the time and it just depends on how
vocal your internal monologue is.

On one of the nights when we broke up I wandered around Brockley and New Cross for hours. I wasn’t looking for anything. I just didn’t want to be the house. I wanted the perpetual motion through darkness as a distraction. As I crossed the end of the Old Kent Road that’s nowhere near Kent, near the burnt out house which isn’t the site of the racist arson attack in the eighties that killed thirteen, but could be, the only other guy abroad at that late hour was coming in the opposite direction.

‘Got any change?’ he asked even though his clothes were newer than mine.

‘Nah,’ I vacantly replied. It was true. I’d just run away, fled the house with nothing but my keys.

‘Cunt,’ he snarled as we passed.

I turned around and hit him. I punched him square in the eye and felt it squish under my knuckle. I kicked him in the testicles so hard that blood seeped through the crotch of his jeans and he crumpled over. I pulled him to the ground and pummelled his temple against the kerbside whilst my thumbs gouged at his jaw, tearing at the corners of his lips.

Except, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. It was a thought that flashed through my mind and for a second it was a possibility, but then it broke apart as I realised no matter my anger it wasn’t worth it. Nothing would have been worth it. I may be guilty of many things, but nothing worse than where the reprimands would be solely self-administrated.

Canada Water to Surrey Quays

2010-08-18T22:00:00.003+01:00

‘Have you ever been Westfield’s, David?’ asked the shopping obsessed and arguably slightly dim girl.

‘No,’ I replied, barely even looking up. ‘No, I haven’t.’

‘You should go. You’d really enjoy it.’

‘I doubt it,’ I muttered.

‘You would.’ Surprisingly she’d heard me and I wondered how many other people heard the things I said under my breath. ‘It’s got all the stores you could want in one place and then it’s got this luxury goods area. You know? Really nice shirts and good quality jewellery and stuff.’

‘Yeah, you see I know that and I still don’t think I’d have fun there.’

‘And when you’ve shopped yourself out you can go and get some food,’ she continued undeterred. ‘They’ve got everything all together in this international area. It’s really quick, good food. You know, Nandos and Wagamama’s and Strada and Giraffe and everyone you’ve heard of.’

‘You’re still not really selling it to me.’

‘You should go.’

‘I’d rather stab my eyes out with a rusty nail,’ I smiled. And seeing as this was a couple of months ago, I added: ‘Besides, it’s in West London. I get a rash if I spend too much time in West London.’

‘Where do you live again, David?’

Now, I knew she was a Hammersmith girl who rarely ventured further south or east than Trafalgar Square and only the most dedicated London explorers ever seem to know where the hell Brockley is hidden, so I went for the it’s marginally better known neighbour: ‘New Cross way.’ She cocked her head and looked baffled. I followed up with the slightly geographically inaccurate, but at least familiar sounding: ‘Between Peckham and Lewisham. Sort of.’

‘Oooh, Neeew Cross,’ she said as though it were somewhere entirely different. ‘There’s a big shopping centre just like Westfield’s there, isn’t there?’

‘Er, nope.’

‘Yes there is.’

‘No there isn’t.’

‘There is.’ She looked confused. ‘I’m sure there is.’

‘I’ve there nearly ten years. I think I’d have noticed.’

Except she was right and I was wrong. Well, sort of.

I stood at the crossing by the exit to Southwark Park and looked across the road at Surrey Quays. Surrey bloody Quays shopping centre. A Tescos, a knock-off camping and sports warehouse, a Frankie and Johnnie’s pizza bar, and some a eighties matchbox disaster of a shopping centre with faded vomit coloured floors and low level high street chains squeezed into surprisingly small retail units. Westfield’s, Europe’s biggest and most pretentious cathedral to the capitalism of crappy tat, it ain’t.

Not that it should aspire to be, either.

I think I’ve only ever been there once (aside from the camping gear warehouse which I go to frequently and am always disappointed by the shoddy nature of the kit) and that was when I forget to pack any t-shirts to visit Michael in Liverpool, years ago, and couldn’t stomach the fight back through the traffic. Buying something new was just easier.

But that’s the slightly odd thing. Like Westfield’s, Surrey Quays is perfectly easy to reach by tube and yet the majority of people come by car.

‘God,’ the strawberry blonde has said to me on more than one occasion, ‘why on earth do you drive in London?’

Well, obviously I’m a diesel guzzling selfish environmental terrorist, but also the reason no-one ever knows where Brockley sits is because it’s not particularly well served by public transport unless you’re happy on the bus or want to go everywhere via London Bridge. Which, if I’m honest, I usually am fine with. My nightbus treks in recent years have been extensive to say the least.

‘Aha,’ she has never said, but I’m borrowing her for the sake of convenience (sorry), ‘but now the East London line’s reopened surely that all changes?’

Hmm, but it’s still only going in one direction, although slightly more integrated it may be. The thing about driving is that it helps you understand how the whole city clips together, not just the routes dictated by the TFL’s central office. The only other way to truly discover the hidden London is to do exactly what I’ve being doing throughout the course of this blog: walk. And we don’t always have the time to walk. Besides, the traffic’s not always that bad. It took google-Steve, Steph and I less than an hour to chunter across from the M4 home. Although that was at almost midnight on a Sunday.

Keen tube map observers will have noticed that I appeared to skipped right past Canada Water. That’s because Canada Water is a bit of a non-place; somewhere that falls in-between other places. Stand on the southbound platform for the East London line and look right. You will be able to see Rotherhithe station less than a hundred metres further up the track; look left and the daylight that heralds Surrey Quays is snubbing against the tunnel’s black. It appears to only exist because the diggers for the Jubilee extension missed intersecting with either of the existing stations.

A nothing area that bears a real name, one derived from the old dockyards where the boats to and from Canada moored up, adjacent to a place that holds a fake identity. Surrey Quays didn’t exist until Thatcher’s docklands’ regeneration commission helped the shopping centre open. Before then it was always Surrey Docks, confusedly so-called not because of the region its ships came from but because it sat on the old county border with Kent. Surrey Quays, a region of London that’s Thatcher’s child. Bet the cockneys who lines the streets with their barbecues and cans of Fosters as the marathon pelts on by in April turning the area into a wholesome street party wouldn’t appreciate being reminded.

Above ground, at Canada Water, there is little to be seen except, in April, the throngs pushing their way down to catch up with the Marathon in either the City or Docklands and the Daily Mail printworks. Whilst arson is always tempting at the sight of the country’s least well and most enthusiastically bigoted daily paper, it’s also noticeable that they still haven’t taken down the sign on the exterior of the building that namechecks the LondonLite. This was one of two free evening papers launched simultaneously to prevent the other getting a market strangehold that told you absolutely nothing about people you’d rather had been chemically put to sleep several years ago. One’s usp was that the ink didn’t come off on your hands. Seriously. That’s how crappy these publications were.

They were distributed by almost violently aggressively men and women on street corners thrusting unwanted scrap paper into your hands, refusing to take ‘no thanks,’ the fact that your hands were either in your pockets or laden with goods as good reason to not want a copy of their publication. The genius that is Smoke once suggested taking copies, folding them up and setting up stall adjacent offering ‘free paper hats,’ to confused commuters.

Still, they were a feature of London street corners near stations and major bus stops for a few years, often be glowered at by Evening Standard hawkers trying to flog a barely superior publication for sixty-five times the cost. For a while, after the disappeared, I missed them. They were a convenient enemy. Like the Charity Muggers who still line the popular pavements they were an easy irritant to moan about. Although the best defence has to be the gentleman I followed along Holborn recently who when greeted with the enthusiastic ‘how are you feeling today, sir?’ responded with a curt ‘hostile.’ But now the free paper floggers are no longer there and, unsurprisingly, it’s only when I consciously try to remember them that they appear in my memory.

So. Canada Water. Don’t believe the map. Except for the occasional conserved duck nest in an artificially tarted up and maintained subsidiary of the Thames, it doesn’t exist.

Still, Surrey Quays (despite the enforced name change) does and it isn’t New Cross. There’s a whole industrial estate in the way complete with Milwall’s the New Den where the riot between Birmingham and London football fans kicked off shortly after I’d moved down. The streets burned for an evening after a Championship playoff match, cars were tipped over, bottles and bricks twisted through the summer evening’s sky and the odd fire burned inside the husk of a Nissan Micra. The evening afterwards I wandered into the pub and leant at the bar next to the battered and bloodied man with ‘hate’ and ‘love’ cut into his knuckles. ‘If a fucking Brummie walked in here now,’ he snarled ‘I’d tear his cock off.’ I ordered my drink in my poshest, most forced accent.

Then there’s the refuse plant visible from the trains and out where in the new year I saw an inflatable Father Christmas being bounced between two mini-jcbs like a complex game of season volleyball. My train was trapped at a signal as the wheeled silently and serenely past broken up fridges and through troughs of pulped household waste, the nine-foot Santa balloon bouncing ahead of them at every twist and turn. In my head some epic piece of swirled strings music played for their soundtrack.

‘Oh, come on. You’re making this up now.’

Well, not really no, but perhaps just a little bit. I mean it happened. Or at least I’m pretty certain it did, but did it really happen like that. Did I think those thoughts at that moment? It becomes difficult not to tilt the language. I get confused, sometimes, as to where the line between the fiction of my internal monologue and reality lies and which side of it I should be standing. Or writing.

In the Observer recently Robert McCrum reviewed a memoir about the Vietnam War and discussed the difference between history and fiction. The function of history, he argued, is to tell the truth whilst the moral drive of fiction is to get it right through the contrivance of invention. In other words, to borrow a phrase from Francis Spufford, to make shit up.

In that case, what is my other discipline? How does the language of sales work? Isn’t that just making up shit that you think people want to hear?

‘How do you go about writing something?’ she asked over the glass topped kitchen table and because I wanted to impress – and because I didn’t really know the answer -I told her a story she wanted to hear about structure and strife. But here’s a recipe that might be closer to the truth (for me anyway): I start with a blank white computer screen and an idea of an emotion and a sliver of a movement and I take a dollop of what’s gone before and I start to make shit up that I hope someone will want to hear. Maybe there’s no-one listening, but that’s my problem and no-one else’s.

Rotherhithe

2010-08-11T22:30:00.002+01:00

I found myself on the south bank at last. I had expected to feel more comfortable, more at ease, but instead I felt slight odd, as though I’d been away too long. As though the journey had taken as long as the reportage of it would do. I paused briefly and attempted to realign myself. It helped if I thought hateful thoughts of Boris who almost certainly wasn’t in the silver testicle that Saturday morning. The weather was too good. He’d be off doing something rich, wench skinning or something. The London Assembly building, that bollock shaped mess of glass and steel, cast a shadow over one of the last naturally open spaces in central London, almost obscuring its new ‘sold for development’ placards firmly implanted into the dusty ground.

I dropped down into the narrow confines of the enthusiastically cobbled streets that ran between the river and the paved road. Once these had been like everywhere else, a mix of warehouses and mills and shipping ports and then they were abandoned and then gentrified into Starbucks and boutiques and pinned up chain restaurants that feed the inevitable drudge of office worker overflow, the Thames path hikers and the tourists waylaid between Tower Bridge and the Design Museum.

I nipped down an alley to the water, reasoning that the river front would be quieter. Instead, in an indication of how long it had been since I’d last been down that way, the towpath seemed to have been widened out and someone was pretending that it was the banks of the Seine by laying out metal tables and horrifically priced inane food from any number of dulling faceless places.

In the heat I beginning to feel quite sweaty and the sudden onset of musked eating and chunky cutlery and bustling warmth made the air constrain around me. I edged away and tried to escape the corporateness.

When, I wondered, had all that boring same-old stuff appeared? The last time I remembered walking along that stretch of river the boards had been drawn across the buildings and a desolate sense had lurked. The night previously, I’d wandered into the Brockley Jack, the place I would later tend pump, for a Friday pint. Whilst waiting to be served, the bassist from the Queens of the Stone Age, bald head, weird twisted goatee and all, waved at me with a slightly confused grin on his face.

‘What’s the bassist from the Queens of the Stone Age doing here?’ I asked the person at my side.

It was only when he came over to speak that I discovered not a Californian bawl, but a Midlands drawl and I realised it was my friend Simon from university, whom I hadn’t seen for years. It was all the more odd given that he should have been at home in Thurso on the north Scottish coast. By coincidence his partner’s father lived in Brockley and was a keen patron of the Jack. The next day we’d hooked up near London Bridge and after a beer or three, had taken their new baby for a stroll along the embankment.

And then, back in 2010, the path abruptly narrowed and stopped. An inlet ran off the Thames and the only crossing was a strap of iron help up by chiselled railings.
On the far side the world was the sort of space I’d been expecting; a run of forgotten buildings that contorted into a tight maze of muddled streets.

At home, I have a book called Derelict London that catalogues the empty shells of the city’s buildings. One such is Chambers Wharf which was once the last remaining run down warehouse on the Thames, proudly used by TV execs from the Professionals to the Sweeney. Yet now even that is being reinvented as luxury flats. People will move back in and haunt what was once there. But that’s the thing with London – it just keeps on having history, on telling stories.

Two cyclists in helmets and day-glo coats wheeled idly past me, their motion hardly justifying their excessive gear.

‘Oh, look at that,’ grinned one of them as they tootled by a corner shop with racks of vegetables and distressed fruit outside. ‘It’s trying so hard to be a proper
deli.’

‘Well,’ cooed the other, ‘someone’s got to try and improve the area.’

‘Twats,’ I muttered to myself hoping that they’d hear but not respond in kind.

The path cut down behind and through some more residential streets. Rows of sixties and seventies low rise council houses that had replaced the waterfront village façade and gained picturesque river views since all the bodies had been removed.
More or less.

‘We don’t all live in your blog,’ I’m worried someone will one day say, even someone badly disguised. ‘You don’t own the world.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I’ll reply, flustered. ‘I’ve got the receipt somewhere.’

‘Gah!’ They’ll explode. ‘Can’t you ever be serious?’

Well, yes and no.

‘I think,’ she ummed in the late afternoon dipping sun of Hyde Park one Saturday, ‘if there was no reference to me at all, then I might get a little offended.’

No pressure, then. Telling things the right way – that’s the trick, in the end, isn’t it? Making the stories and the ghosts work for me and not the other way around?

Eventually, my route popped out at a wide open spot. There was nothing but the breaker concrete wall at the waterside and on the city rim a wide, raised patch of green with the hint of a moat running around it. There was a public information sign surprisingly free from graffiti, but not as surprising as learning it was the one time site of a manor house built for Edward I. A holiday home for the twelfth century self-styled hammer of the Scots to jolly his way down the river to, aboard a
galley tugged along by Welsh prisoners of war.

Plague ships used to bubble down the Thames to Rotherhithe. They bought the dying to isolation hospitals until their bodies could be dragged out to Blackheath or Nunhead, to be dumped down the pits.

The Mayflower launched from Rotherhithe. It pulled out of London, her crew stumbling out the Shippe pub and up her gang plank, before snaking around the Kent nub down to Southampton to collect the Pilgrim Fathers. Her Captain, Christopher Jones, didn’t stay in America. He came to London to die and was buried in the church yard opposite the pub that some sentimental bugger decided to rename after the famous vessel that went off to help forge a nation.

Opposite, Ed’s summer residence, inside what looked like a concrete bunker, was a pub. My resistance finally faltered. The hot weather and my exertions had won. I wanted a pint.

Inside the Angel, I found classic styled wood panels complete with glass arches dividing snugs and saloons. I stood at the bar between the tattooed, jaded eyed labourers and the tweed jacketed, moustached retired gents. I was mildly shocked to discover it was a Sam Smith’s pub - one that was a far cry from their usual locale of Fitzrovia and the surrounding area. Although, of course, the whole Sam Smith’s set up refuses to make sense. Small brewer from darkest Yorkshire buys up dilapidated central London pubs restoring them to their Victoriania beauty and then by selling only their own brand booze undercuts the rest of the city. The most famous of their beers was always Man in the Box. An alpine style lager recognisable by the elaborate pump top of a old man puppet dressed in traditional German clothes inside a transparent plastic case. Despite the removal of the models years ago, ‘A pint of Man in the Box, please,’ will still get you the same beer on the counter.

If only the bitter tasted better, they’d be perfect.

Never-the-less, I took my cold pint and wandered out onto the veranda overlooking the river.

On the southern side the river felt quieter, less imposing than it had appeared from the north. It was as though that wide exposure view somehow calmed the aggressive swirl that peeked out between snipped of buildings earlier. The water was free from traffic. The pleasure cruisers only came that far east if they were heading for Greenwich and even the floating junkyards, usually a pit of rusty contagion, seemed to have gone on their summer holidays.

At the other end of the veranda a man in cycling lycra squatted on the floor and his head between his knees, a tabloid paper laid out in front of him, a half drunk lager leaving a translucent patch to the top corner of the newsprint.

‘You all right?’ I asked.

Slowly he raised his head to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot as though from tears, or a syringe into the corner. He appeared to pleading, but for what I couldn’t say. He stayed like that for a moment, trying to work each other out, trying to figure what was what, until he looked back down to his paper.

My phone bipped to itself, deep inside my pocket. I took it out and read the message. I smiled inwardly, suppressing the pleasure at her response and found myself being surprisingly pleased at being surprisingly pleased. I nodded to my distraught drinking companion, but he was having none of it, so I finished my beer and felt a little bit cool. Until I reminded myself how I was spending my day.

Once outside I cut across the bottom end of Southwark Park and past yet more people baking themselves in the pleasant glow of summer’s weekends. On the far side of the park, the Rotherhithe Tunnel sank down under the river taking a flood of cars into its bending and twisting depths. It’s not a place for the claustrophobic. Unlike its bigger cousin, the Blackwall Tunnel, the Rotherhithe is two way and refuses to follow a direct route, manoeuvring itself under some unknown river bed obstacle.
The oncoming traffic always feels as though it is about to chink the corner of the bumper at each and every tight corner. But worse, is the congestion of cyclists wearing oxygen masks to prevent asphyxiation; flimsy pieces of cloth to block out the cloying exhausts. I can’t bear to keep the windows down and I’m underneath for a shorter period of time and not exerting myself. How do they survive?

At the entrance maw, Stu and I once whooped Michael on through the early stages of his marathon whilst further down the road a dj stood on the roof of uber-cockney pub shouting out individual names for encouragement to the tune of Keep on Runnin’ and Eye of the Tiger. Michael came round the corner, waved to the bellows of his name and disappeared onwards towards docklands, back the way I’d come.

I appeared to have left Iain Sinclair and George Orwell and Joseph Conrad and all the others on the north bank. There were no writers ghosts lurking around that corner of south London. Which was odd, because it’s packed with as much history and imagination as everywhere else. From being the birthplace of Michael Caine to the home of the Norwegian government in exile during the Second World War, there’re plenty of memories to be found. Perhaps, they just had to be mine and I hadn’t formed them yet.

Wapping

2010-08-04T23:23:00.002+01:00

Once upon a time Wapping was one of the hidden sides of London. It was a haunt for pirates and navy deserters and drunkards and whores and crazies. It was where the original Mack the Knife would stab you as soon as kiss you. As time wound on, it stayed the same and yet the city evolved around it. Dockyards appeared to serve ever further flung lands and pushed the area deeper out onto the rim of the Thames. Its people became increasingly isolated from the rest of the city, buried in the gaps between the river and the thumping warehouses and twirling cranes that unloaded the first wooden and then steel ships that chugging in and out of London. The Nazis bombed the hell out it, but Wapping didn’t particularly care. Nor did it when the dockyards dried up and the warehouses fell silent and the boats stopped coming, even though it was left even further out on the periphery.

All alone.

I suspect that’s how it likes it.

But still time changes a place. Riverside apartments became trendy; narrow cobbled streets no longer automatically equalled danger, but instead exuded an old world charm. The old hydraulic pump station that had sat derelict and surly for a generation, was restored and reopened into a swanky restaurant, with dinners squeaked in around the remaining mechanics. The soft pale white of dining sheets and silver glimmer of trendy furniture were offset against the rust smudged workable green of the dynamos. Down in the basement, where the water once ebbed and flowed, in a damply dank room there is an art gallery where light and physical matter fight against legacy for dominance over the space.

Like any other east end gallery space, I’ve gone and been mesmerised by the smartness and beauty and I’ve turned up and been indifferently baffled. Space and light tend to be its preferred themes; images cranked in blackened corners, shapes contracted around golden curves underneath the darkness. Abstract and specific; vague and fixed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

The Wapping Project. I find the name disturbing. Projects are brief and fleeting, defined by time boundaries. Does a gallery-restaurant combo really aim to give the whole area an finite conclusion point?

On the opposite side of the road, there stands the Prospect of Whitby, a pub which claims to be the oldest in London. Meh. So do plenty of others. Certainly, there appears to have been some venue designed for the patrons to come and get inebriated on the site as far back as when fat old Henry VIII sat on the throne. Doubt it was the same place though. Still, it’s a pretty enough place with windows like those from the stern of pirate ship overlooking the Thames. It forms a trio of boozers, along with Captain Kidd and the Town of Ramsgate that hug the river and take their characters from the myths of the oceans.

Tthe river dominates much of Wapping. Stairs snake down the side of these pubs deep into the waters. Once they provided steps to waiting flat skiffs to be punted across to the southern side or up and down the choppy, stinkingly foul waters. Then, someone hit upon the bright idea of dumping bodies into the Thames and these were the easiest, quietest, murkiest access points. Dastardly deeds to be done under the dome of darkness. These days, they’re more likely to be borrowed by film crews and tourists looking for a moody shot of London’s forbidden side.

But the river. The Thames screeches and stinks and swells for attention. This is the true docklands, where the water not the steel towers reign. It binds the people to the city as much as it acts as a conduit from west to east. The Thames flows endlessly, starting out in the rich suburbs and through the even richer centre and out, out into the east where the people live. It carries ideas of Londonness, a definition of us, and yet in Wapping it is only visible in-between the gaps. People were so desperate to be close to it they lived on the very rim. Or alternatively they put up barriers that they were then forced to inhabit, acting as a shield between the majority and its corrupting tide.

Joseph Conrad, by all accounts, used to drink in the Prospect. There’s part of me that’s slightly sceptical about that fact since I walked past a blue plaque for his house in Victoria the other day. It was a trudge, at the end of the nineteen century, from Victoria to Wapping, but in the end, this tale isn’t interested in fact. It relies on fictions, on stories to give it life. You didn’t believe that all of this could be true, did you?

Anyway, so Conrad supped ale in the Prospect with all the low down scumfucks who passed through its blood tattered doors on a nightly basis. Conrad was born in the Ukraine and English may have been his third language, but still he wrote stories with heart, with head and with something to say. His most famous, the Heart of Darkness, was nominally about the congo although a bunch of Americans made it about Vietnam for Apocalypse Now, but it could just have easily been about the Thames. The noble and honest man of Kew sails downriver, fighting the sheer humanity he fails to truly find on the way to a final conflict with a man lost within his own reflected madness in the east, perhaps even in Wapping, perhaps even in the Prospect of Whitby.

Hmm. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Isn’t that the thing about stories, about fictions, that you tell them and then retell them in a slightly different way, with a slight adjustment of the emphasis and then the one single truth can be about everything that’s ever mattered? Isn’t that the thing about life?

Wapping tube station, as it once was before the East London Line became rebranded as part of the London Overground network, juts a little spitefully out of the cobbles and soft red bricks. It marks the exit not only of the first tunnel under the Thames, but the first tunnel underneath a watermass anywhere in the world. That tophatted, cigar chomping Victorian of note, Brunel, burrowed his way from south to north, ignoring collapsing soft soil and clay; letting the Thames flood back up, drowning his men and ruining his equipment. What did he care about lives and wives and children left bereft back home, he was carving history for himself.

His stubbornness was remarkable as it took eighteen years to claw through the three-hundred-and-ninety-six metres. It was intended for horse drawn carts and carriages, but was instantly pedestrianised until the steam propelled engines, which must surely have flooded the narrow stretch with putrid choking black smoke, came followed eventually by the new air-conditioned electric beasts that silently slipped underneath my feet.

Certain north Londoners no doubt consider the fact that the tunnel was dug from the south bank outwards as further example of how desperate their southern cousins are to escape the inferior life on the far bank. I prefer to think of it as the extension of a unifying hand across the waters; a hand that is grasped, but with a slight sarcastic sneer in the doing so.

‘The problem is,’ said the girl with the French accent, ‘he’s just too clever. I’m not used to going out with someone who I don’t feel intellectually superior to.’ I let her talk. Sometimes it’s just easier. ‘God, it’s so much harder going out with someone you actually fancy.’

She had a point. Of course it’s easier to bedazzle someone of moderate intelligence with a sour and quick wit. (‘Oh babes, you totally crack me up you do.’) But in the longterm it makes it harder, not easier, despite the inevitable conflict of two strong minded individuals(‘You’re just a bully. Another bully who wants his own way all the time.’). In the end it’s easiest when the fit is utterly natural and not grounded on a fakery. When the only thing told was the truth.

I thought for a moment about getting on the train and nipping under the river to Rotherhithe. That would be acceptable, I thought. I would be continuing to follow the rails of the East London line. But, I looked over the darkened glass of my specs. It was a gorgeous summer’s day. Walking felt more appropriate. I winked at the station, knowing full well that I’d see it again some day, and headed west for the first time that day; west towards the bridge.

I walked up past Execution Dock; a small strip of water tugged land which was once the place where nautical criminals were sent to repent their sins in the maker’s purgatory. A dedicated court churned the cases, passing the almighty’s judgement down. Those sentenced to death would be hung by the neck off the shore until they were dead, dead, dead and then their stricken bodies would be pinned inside the cold embrace of irons and dangled above the river until the high tide had submerged them and washed away the last traces of their life, thrice.

The execution dock’s most famous victim was Captain Kidd, a Scotsman who made his name and his fortune in the Caribbean mainly fighting pirates and the French as a naval barrage gun and cutlass for hire to the local British administrators. He appears to have managed to get too far into bed with the Whigs who were toppled by the Tories and Kidd sent to hell as a present. Since then, his real life has been rewritten and fictionalised until a myth of high-seas piracy is all that could possibly endure. His life was reimagined to more aptly fit its end.

I briefly stepped out onto a grassy patch next to the lapping river. Boys and girls lay poleaxed by the sunshine, skins crisply turning lobster pink, eyes sharply closed underneath their oversized sunglasses. It was but a brief glimpse of a docile afternoon before I tilted further into the modernist flats cluttering around stream inlets and fortified memories of a forgotten age which dragged the whole area into a different class from the one that fought running battles in 1986 against Rupert Murdoch’s closure of the print works. The echoes of bottles crashing on stone and socialist rights chants as militant as that of the Durham miners had died away; drowned out by rebuilding schemes designed to sanitise.

As I walked, I was reminded of a time I went in the opposite direction. We hiked from Tate Modern on the southern bank across from St Paul’s out to the Mile End home of Matt’s Gallery. From nationalised heroic populist modern art all the way to sub cultural alternativeness filtered through a middle-aged middle-classed appreciatively empty wine glass and the drifting image of the scars on the girl’s forearms. I forget exactly when it was, but for some reason it felt like the world was on pause, as though there was time for lingering and dawdling because in the sunshine life would forver be a holiday, until our final breath had been taken.

And in the moment between times I popped out of a side passage and the luxurious basin of St Katherine’s dock opened out in front of me, replete with its Starbucks masquerading as a dumpy lighthouse. And in front of me, on the far side of soulless Hilton, Tower Bridge cut across the glimmering skyline.

The bridge was a mess of turquoise girders and neo-gothic turrets of plain brick. Tower Bridge arches the river confident in being taller than its surroundings, taller and more imposing that the castle crumpled into the bank from which it takes its name. There are plenty of stories surrounding Tower Bridge. Like the time the number seventy-eight jumped the gap as the ramp began to raise; or when the stockbroker being investigated for fraud buzzed it in his toy plane before flying off north until he ran out of fuel and crashed in flames across the Lake District’s fells; but this isn’t the place to tell them. Tower Bridge is too central for this tale. I was just passing through, after all.

The bridge is, however, a landmark in more than one sense. It is such a iconic symbol of London that the myth of the American millionaire who bought the old London Bridge to span the gorge on his Arizonian ranch believed he was buying Tower Bridge instead still survives despite emphatic denials from everyone involved. But it’s more than this. It’s the point where north meets south; where east meets west. The East End doesn’t want anything further west of Tower Bridge (well, perhaps Soho); the west can stick the rest.

I stood in the middle of the bridge; one foot on either side of the divide so I could look down and see the river churning muck and grime and all the wasted promise that makes it so special. Should we look for divides, I wondered. Or should we just take the city as a whole. Is it too big for that? Or is it just all the places I haven’t been to yet waiting to tell me something; something about themselves and their people and something about who I can become rather than who I have been.

I stepped fully over the gap and smiled. South London. Home again.