dylan

Helps you get up on a Thursday morning which is actually your Monday morning. Easy to forget, good to remember.

queen 6

Bob picks me up in his sports car around eleven. I’ve got a bag and not much more. I’m in a bit of a state. Bob plays some Morrissey and we drive down the M3 with the roof off. We come off the motorway early and go down the back roads, via Alton. I start to feel more like myself. We get to Winchester around two. The idea had been to stop off in a country pub for lunch, but we never found one, so we go to The Queen instead and eat something in The Saloon Bar extension which never used to exist. I bore him stupid, telling him about the good times and the bad. I tell him the pub is like a home from home.

queen 5

There’s always a lull at some point in weddings. Between getting from the church or registry office to the place where the reception’s going to take place. In this instance there’s a perfect solution to this lull. We all head off to The Queen for a quick couple of sneaky pints. There’s probably about two dozen of us, soaking up the September sun in the front garden. Everyone’s dressed like they should be. The stolen hour glows through the day. Strangers talk to neighbours like long-lost friends. Long-lost friends lurk in the back garden. The past bends to the beauty of the future.

queen 4

It’s just me and Tim. It’s about the fourth generation of publicans. Some have liked us and some haven’t. I still miss the first one, who had the crazy dog and the chickens, and had bought a job-lot of benches from The Oval. He got me to play cricket for the pub team. I scored no runs but took a good catch. His cricket pictures are still on the walls.

This is a long time later. One of the old fogeys is there. He’s been there as long as anyone. We recognise each other but we never talk though we’ve probably talked a hundred times. For some reason he ends up at our table. We’re in the saloon bar. He’s coarse and boorish and drunk. He’s clever enough to get away with it most of the time. But not this time. He doesn’t know what he’s let himself in for.

Tim and I laugh all the way home.

queen 3

It’s a Friday night. We’re sitting on the floor in the public bar. This is back in the days when you had to go outside to get from one bar to the other; when you had to go outside and round the corner to go the gents; when the pub still had a boules court, before it was converted into a carpark; before beer reached a pound a pint. When the juke box still played.

The juke box is playing anything from: Another Girl Another Planet; Steve McQueen; Police and Thieves; Baby Jane; and many more. We know our favourites. For 50p you get 8 plays. Our songs are stacked up.

We’re sitting on the wooden floor, next to the fire. The bar is packed. Every seat is taken. Nowhere else lets us sit on the floor, but nowhere else is like The Queen. Everything’s going swimmingly. Then Ruth knocks her pint over and it goes even more swimmingly.

queen 2

Somewhere in the course of that Summer, the seventeen year old had his first official drink in a pub. It’s a pint of lager, natch, drunk for some unknown reason in the perilous front garden.

queen 1

There are chickens in pens in the back garden. A dog is running around with a megaphone round its neck. The dog is mad. It chases its own tail. It chases the cats. It chases balls. It chases demons.

A stage has been set up. The Queen has never had a gig before. It will be The Sidekicks second gig. The first took place in Freddies’ toyes. Most of the songs are original. There are a few covers. Louie Louie. Love in Vain, Blues via Stones. Maybe an Iggy track.

It’s a warm Summer’s evening. The dog runs mayhem through the small crowd. Most of them from school. A few girls and strangers thrown in.

A seventeen year old is asked to introduce the band. He’s not sure why he’s been chosen and he doesn’t know what to say. When the call comes he goes on stage and looks over the garden and feels tongue tied. He mumbles something and dashes off.

The gig is a success. Kids dance under the apple trees, the sun shines, a respectable noise is made. The dog gets even more demented and the chickens flap their wings to the erratic beat. The only down note comes afterwards when Paul tells the seventeen year old he thought he was going to give it the big intro.

Ladies and Gentleman, tonight, The Queen Inn hosts the greatest band in the world: The Sidekicks!

Rather than the mumbled hello he shyly manufactured. Ten years later he might have pulled it off.

Not that it matters. It was all about being there.

on finding old photos in the loft

It will never occur again. That kind of perfection. Faces will never look the same as they did then. The world will never feel so free or fearless. Or maybe it might, but should it do so the wave shall not sweep over me as it did. Picking me up and twisting and turning me. A wave which might be called a wave of sheer happiness. At least that's the story the photos show. In spite of the fissures present even then; three relationships which would not last the year; six faces smiling in spite of that. And all the other things besides. You could say, in that case, that the photos do not tell the whole story. Yet it seems to me they tell the true story. It is visible in the faces. Touched by the exhilaration of being in that place, in that time. Faces that are made to live in that time; sit in that theatre; on that swing; made for the moment the camera captured them. Out of that time, these photos, you can see a reason to believe in the dream of another way of living; where cares can be banished in joy; where the trappings of individuality might be subsumed and reinvented beneath a common drive towards... an essence of feeling alive.

insomnia

Creeps up unawares. God bless insomnia, it's as regular as the seasons. And unpredictable as Mad March weather. At 1am, it's just a niggle. At 2 it's no more than a late night. At 3 it's starting to bug you. By 4 you've quit caring, and wouldn't mind spying the dawn break through the trees. At 5 you're asleep. Sometime after 6, the dawn breaks through the trees.

Your friend is back.

winchester 5

It's after midnight. There are still lights in the rooms of the housemaster who lives across the way, but we decide to risk it. We climb the wall and run through the large garden. At the other end of the garden, we climb the fence. Land on the pavement. Now is the time to walk briskly. Still in the badlands. When we reach the first playing field we can start to relax. When we get to the second, my friend can light a cigarette. I don't smoke. We get to the water meadows. They glisten under moonlight. The reeds shimmer. The water gurgles. Trees loom out of darkness. Swans patrol the banks. It's cold but we don't feel it. For an hour we inhabit another planet.

strength

This Christmas, whilst the mutant dancer has been resting, I have cooked, written a treatment and a half, walked, watched my friend on TV two nights running, eaten the appropriate amount, not smoked, not drunk much, played Trivial Pursuit, mediated, kept my cool, hovered in my nightie, and above all, had the strength to see wood from trees. Not to play those games which it sometimes seems are an ineluctable facet of our genetic make-up.

home

Home is a concept and a reality. This is a kind of home, although I have never lived here for more than two months at a time. A home in spite of itself. Yet it is not a home really, as I know, for I shall never live here for more than two months at a time, never be able to. Perhaps 'home' is all relative. The other night, talking to Graciela in St Pauls, I knew that Montevideo will always be a home to me, forever, although I lived there but a while, and have no physical home there to call my own. Just as London might be my home (though I cannot be quite so certain in spite of the fact I have lived there most of my life). I have a room in a house which I can call home for now, and own a home in the place I have considered home which is not currently home. And at the same time I know it to be true that in spite of these many different homes, concept and reality, I am also, for the first time in as long as I can remember, without a home at all.

on top of st catherine's hill

A woman walks past me and says snap, only her hat's from Peru, not Bolivia.
I am an offensive charm weapon, talking to strangers, friend and foe alike.
In the mis-maze, I speak to a friend who's hiding in his room, telling me
It's all so dysfunctional and weird. Well, of course. This is Winchester.
At Christmas. What do you expect? They used to send us here before breakfast
No matter the weather, call out our names in Latin, wait for our 'sum'
Then send us back for baked beans on toast. The place is still populated
By too many twits, but it has a family feel. Couples with Thermos flasks of
Tomato soup, kids with bow and arrow, fathers demonstrating sledging
Prowess. All harmless in the end, I try to tell my whispering friend.

taboo

What is taboo and what is not? How do we, us writers, the whole damned pack, draw the line? What lurks behind the sofa, inappropriately?

Nothing like Christmas at home to trigger this kind of question.

teenage festivity

One year, it was christmas as usual in Winchester. George and Dorothy were there, and all the siblings. I'd been out the night before. Who knows who with. Presents are always unwrapped in the morning. It's a long ceremony, involving selection, opening, apreciation. Essentially a spectator sport. Intersperesed with mince pies. I always remember this hangover as it adds weight to my evolving perception that hangovers decrease in intensity with age. On that morning, I was so sick, all I could do was lie on the sofa and grunt upon occasion. Presents were as welcome as school tapioca. Every single aspect of this thing called Christmas Day had been engineered in order to make me feel worse. I survived the morning, battled through lunch and slept all afternoon.

eve underground

The tube's not busy. There's a few people in my carriage. Different in gender, race, perhaps creed. Each one of us has a bag containing wrapped presents.

jaramusch

A man sits alone on his sofa. There is music playing and a half-drunk bottle of champagne. The camera holds on this scene for thirty seconds. Nothing happens.

A man is on a bus in a town he does not know. Two girls are chattering. He overheards their chatter. It's significance is marginal. All that matters is that he hears it, and we hear him hearing it.

A man falls over on the same sofa.

A kid stares out of the window of a car. He's wearing a track suit.

+++

It's all in the detail.

fitzcarraldo

Once upon a time the very act of making a film was a miracle. When it became commonplace, the filmmakers began to take their magic for granted. Herzog and Kinski came along and realised a way of recapturing a sense of awe. They went to places where films shouldn’t be made, and made them. In German. They took the Amazon for a set. Where time stood still, so the extras didn’t need period costumes. Challenged themselves to achieve remarkable things, and film them, no matter how arduous that process might be for themselves, the crew and the viewer. Fitzcarraldo lasts nearly three hours. A large chunk of screen time is spent in dragging a steamship over a mountain. The steamship inches forwards. It’s progress is painstaking. And miraculous.

winchester 4

It’s mid-afternoon. I’m walking beside the graveyard with James, who is sometimes known as Muppet. The graveyard is where people go to smoke or drink or get freaked out. We’ve done none of these things. We’re just walking.

I climb onto the wall. The wall’s more than head height. It’s made of flint coloured stones. The view’s good from up there.

A man comes up behind us. He’s not that old. Maybe mid twenties. Ten years older than us. The man asks what we think we’re doing. We don’t know what to answer. We’re walking. Walking on the wall. The man tells me to get down. I don’t see why I should. The man says:

Stop desecrating the cemetery.

We’ve never heard that word used before. It makes us laugh. The man repeats himself, twice. The word sounds absurd.

It’s also powerful enough to get me down off the wall.

The man walks on. It’s only later that it will strike me as irregular that someone should be so bothered by a kid walking along the wall of the graveyard.

tulse hill oblivion

The absent hosts have an expensive phone. It has a built-in answerphone and if I only knew how to make it work I could also use the speakerphone. It sits proudly on the low coffee table like a jewel in the crown.

+++

At dawn, Sedley and Matthew head off for a walk. There’s people crashed out on the sofa. I think I’m still up when they get back. It’s a Latin night. Sedley tells me that Matthew started leaping over cars. I’ll use this dubious piece of information for the best man’s speech.

+++

A baby screams downstairs. It screams at any time of night or day. It’s screaming is muted by the walls. It’s a comforting sound.

+++

I drink too much and sink against a wall and feel like all I want to do is get out of there, even though I’ve only been there a month or so and I like the place. I wonder why I always end up feeling like this. No matter where I live.

+++

We go out round the corner to the pub. It could be our first night out. Everything is reinvented. Pub; friends; beer; England. Everything is brand new and tastes better than it’s ever done before. There’s a bouncy castle in the back garden. It lures us in and we all bounce. We bounce without effort. Drunken adults bounce with an ease and grace that would put absent children to shame.

+++

I spend the whole night awake with a headache. I walk round the ample sized sitting room, moan a bit. The sun comes up. At six I walk down to the garage to buy some aspirin. The early morning air is mild. It has the texture of a fine school morning. Having fought the headache through the night, I know the worst is done. The aspirin will kill it. The headache is still there, but my frown has gone.

+++

I rifle through my absent hosts music collection. Listen to The Specials and Gil Scott Heron and Sly and the Family Stone and Aztec Camera. Music has a way of clinging to place, like a vine.

molar 2

The dentist’s is part of a wartorn terrace on Acre Lane. Random Brixton characters walk in off the street, demanding instant dental care. They come away beaming.

The dentist is none too bothered that I have ignored him for two years. He seems in a relaxed mood, taking my phone number and talking about optimising his customer service techniques. He thinks a phone call might be more persuasive than a card. I imagine him calling me at ten on a Friday night, beer and fags in hand, using the fear of god and dentures to reel me back to his chair.

The filling that fell out on Monday was the same one he replaced two years ago. He takes an X-ray. He says that if the nerve within the tooth is damaged, that will require root canal surgery. The nerve will need to be re-activated. He probes and asks if it hurts. I believe it to be a good thing that it does not hurt, but he tells me its not. When the drill starts to tingle through the novocaine I sigh with relief. The nerve lives on.

He inserts a new filling and says it could go at any time. Whilst most of my teeth have somehow made it to middle age in good condition, this one exists within a cycle of decay. The remedial options sound frightening enough to ensure I’ll steer clear of dentistry until the next time the tooth falls out or the Friday night phone call catches me unaware.

harrow

The child gets into bed with his parents. It must be a weekend morning. The room has long dark curtains. Which might have been dark green. The wallpaper has a design on it. The bed is against the back wall. It seems big.

The child listens to the breathing of his parents. He hears the rhythms overlap. He chooses one breath, and tries to breathe in time with it. Sometimes all three sets of breathing overlap. More often than not they don't. He lies there for what seems like the longest time in the world. Time doesn't have much meaning for him. He listens to the sound of breathing. He feels their breathing in his rib cage. He tries to breathe in time to it. He wants all the breath to be one.

+++

Across the road there's a greengrocer. The boy goes there with his mother. His mother chooses vegetables and the greengrocer places them in a brown paper bag. He spins the bag round, holding it by the corners. There's a magic to it. The boy watches the bag spin through the air. The greengrocer grins and hands him the bag.

+++

The boy's alone in the flat. Just for a while. No time at all. His little sister's crying. The boy peers through the curtain. He's waiting for his mother to get back. He thinks there's a point at which he will start to worry. That point hasn't arrived yet, but he knows it will do.

+++

In the back garden, a hole is being dug. Yellow Submarine plays on the radio. The hole is enormous. It's as big as the whole garden. It goes down for miles. He can imagine this hole going all the way to the centre of the world. His father tells him that if they keep digging, they'll end up on the other side of the world. He asks where that is. His father tells him that's Australia. He doesn't know where Australia is.

job number 40

I’d been working on a building site on a hospital in Watford. George got it into his head that working for Sainsbury’s would be a step up. He fixed up an interview and I got the job.

The store was in Uxbridge. Supposedly one of the four biggest in the country. The first two days were dedicated to staff training. Most of which consisted of videos outlining the cost of shoplifting and the fact that if any member of staff was caught fleecing the company in any way they’d be chained to a rock and smeared in Taste The Difference Albuquerque honey. Thereby encouraging discerning ants, rodents and sweet-toothed birds to consume the fleecer’s entrails.

These videos proved to be the high point. Out on the shop floor it was the dictatorship of the petty. Fetching and carrying and stacking, and doing all these things inappropriately. Eventually they let me loose on the tills. Automated scanning tills were a novelty and no-one in the shop knew how to use them. It was the lead-up to Christmas and queues would stretch as far as the dishwasher powder aisle. I had a knack for over or under charging. Many was the up-standing freewoman of Uxbridge who noted that her bill was twelve pence out and returned to thrust this proof of my incompetence under my nose with an expression of joyous fury.

I was exiled to marshal trolleys in the carpark. In spite of the cold, this was more satisfying work. Seeing how long you could make your trolley snake, set it loose and watch it writhe its way past old ladies and shiny Ford Cortinas.

Working for Sainsbury’s felt like branding yourself as a third class citizen. I spent my regulated breaks on the phone to an employment agency, begging them to find me a way out. Before Christmas I’d escaped and was working in the most tedious job in the world, at a legal firm near Gloucester Road. I got there just in time for the Christmas party.

Sainsbury’s held off paying me my final cheque. George got so incensed that we drove up the A40 to Uxbridge together, burst in with all guns blazing, steered clear of the honey shelves, robbed a till, and high-tailed it back to Rayner’s Lane.

molar

Another chill Christmasy evening. My friend’s five minutes late. I buy a packet of cheese and onion crisps. She’s waiting outside St Paul’s. Every brick a shadow of another brick. The site of Greyfriars Monastery, demolished in the twelth century. Replaced by another and another and another. Stumps rising from the soil. Torn out, re-sown. A plot of land that might never again be left in peace. I bite on a crisp. Something’s wrong. It doesn’t feel like it used to. The place where the tooth has always been is empty. The gap feels like a loss. In the pub we talk about Uruguay. She tells me stories of friends whose parents were killed or imprisoned. Rosencof’s daughter doesn’t get on with her father. Only now, after four governments (We count them: Sanguinetti, Lacalle, Sanguinetti again, Battle) does her country have a government which is prepared to dig up the bodies. She knows the man who’s leading the excavations. Until these things are done, nothing will ever change. We talk about Polonio. She says it’s the only place in the world where she could take someone and say there is no running water, no toilets, no electricity, no comforts, and promise them they will have an experience they’ll treasure forever. I hand her my play to read. I remember the play has a line about multi-coloured plastic teeth. Solomon promises they are the shape of the future.

new year's eve

The whole family walks down the road towards the beach. No one's quite sure if this is the beginning of the twenty first century, or if that took place a year ago in London. The night's balmy. People are eating big steaks on Arocena, just like any other year. A century ago you could only get here by horse and buggy. The beach still has that wildness to it. Sand dunes slide away to the East. The sea, which is also a river, sparkles. A few days ago, on Christmas Eve, when the kids were squabbling over who got what present, a clock stopped. Now, in the streetlit dark, all's peaceful. We bathe in the warm night air. The waves usher us over the threshold.

the guru

The guru's sitting on the sofa when I get back. I've lost count of how much Guiness has been drunk. It's a winter drunk, fierce and warming. In the cab on the way home, my friend says the killer line as we eat a bag of chips balancing on my knee and I dig up the reply and who knows if it's right or wrong or true or not, but all I do know is that I am not ready to find a guru sitting on the sofa when I get in. The guru fends me off. He keeps his calm. He tells me I need to travel to India. Start at the top and work my way down to the bottom.

sao paulo tokyo london liverpool

More evidence of a shrinking world:

Grafite is brought on as a substitute with fifteen minutes to play. He’s in Tokyo. About a month ago, Ciara went to see the annual Sao Paulo prison beauty pageant. She was locked up all day with beautiful murderers, robbers, and other assorted criminals. The prison beauty pageant guest of honour, whose photos figure on her website, was the same Grafite.

This shrinkage might be something else we need to take steps to combat. Like global warming and rising sea levels. We'll end up trying to fit fifty billion people on the same square foot of (mental) space.

when will I be famous?

Bros are being plugged on the radio by Simon Bates. The only feasible reaction is to despise them.

Our favoured tunes include Prefab Sprout, Lloyd Cole, Scritti Politti, Prince, The Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, James Brown, the Housemartins, the Redskins, the Blow Monkeys. The tinny sound coming out of the radio is music for a nothing generation. In those days pop could still get away with politics. From Costello to Weller to Bragg through to The The and pure pop like The Communards. This Bros sound is garish and narcissistic. It has no place in the little house with the blue door.

Depite Bates’ relentless plugging, the single goes nowhere. It washes over the other side of the little house and lands on a derelict shore. It seems that Bros are destined never to be.

+++

A year or so later, the machine is up and working. I’ve moved to London, Bros are on the crest of a wave. Pop was sliding into the vortex.

+++

A year or so later, Bros’s bubble has burst. The second or third album tanks. Other boy bands are waiting to steal their short-lived crown.

It’s the nineties. Dorian Grey is resident in the aforementioned King’s Road warehouse-temple of C-list celebrity, The Garage.

A clean cut white man, about my age, walks into the stall with a bulky black bodyguard/ assistant. The stall is about the size of a shoebox. The man rifles efficiently through both racks, a seasoned shopper. I place him. He’s a Goss twin.

He says he likes them. He buys about three shirts. As many as we sometimes sold in three days. A few weeks later he’s back. He buys four more. I start to warm to him. He likes our shirts. He puts his money where his mouth is. He says we’re ridiculously underpriced. A few weeks later, the bodyguard/ assistant comes back and buys some more. He says his boss likes the shirts.

Matt Goss comes back one more time. He looks tired. He’s got a solo album out. He knows it’s going to get slated. It does. He can’t be much more than twenty five and he’s yesterday’s man. He buys some more shirts. I wish him luck with the album. He says thanks. He tells me our shirts are really good. We have to stick at it.

Within six months, the Garage stint is over. I never see Matt Goss again. I will never be capable of feeling as ill-disposed towards his short-lived band as I was when I first heard its music on the radio. The wannabe refrain of their first single has somehow acquired an unimaginable pathos.

watching a film about history

The film is in an ongoing edit. This week, I have watched it twice, giving notes, then leaving Mr Curry and the editor to play around with it. Editing at this point seems similar to writing: you look at the draft, see how you can improve it, make changes, look at it again. The closer you get to the end, the more minute the changes become, yet, all the same, each new edit makes the film feel like a different construction altogether, hopefully for the better.

There are many strangenesses in the watching of this film. Watching the actor whose house I am now living in. Seeing the sun of a Summer which has passed. Learning new meanings in lines written over a year ago. And more. But among these strangenesses is the way that my personal history permeates what is on screen. Not just in the friends whose faces are immortalised. In the detail too. The pictures on the wall which no-one will notice, from the trip through Uyuni. The surly Quechua driver’s eyes in the rear mirror, captured from the back seat. The car, the mighty mule, which Merrick drives off in, blankets on the back and the aura of its brief spell in our possession. Finally, though there may be other things which I will only spot later, the three headed silver plated candlestick, which belonged to George and Dorothy, which I have somehow inherited; which sat in their flat, and then sat in mine and which will forever adorn a Devon kitchen table.

The film is a part of my history, spinning its own stories. Yet it is also a receptacle of my history, both in the content of the words and ideas it deals with, and also in the physical content of its two dimensional matter.

things not to eat on a hangover

kippers
scrambled egg - especially
chocolate cake
venison meatballs
turtle soup
monkey brains
raw liver
raw chillies
raw fingers
okra
tapioca
hessian
shoes

constant

So he's still there. For the first time in what might be months I am in a position to switch on the TV around 11pm. He's still there, as sarcastic as ever. It's good to see him. He scowls and furrows his brow and says 'really' with aplomb. I'd forgotten he existed for a while.

crash

I stop and decide to turn around. It’s early afternoon. I am driving down a country lane. I reverse into someone’s driveway. The driveway has box hedges on either side, the height of a house. I pull straight out. The van clips me. The impact cannot have been too great, as I am not wearing a seatbelt, and although I am thrown forward, my head does nothing more than bump, sharply, against the windscreen.

The Renault’s front right hand wing is a mess. The steering’s affected. The Renault’s not going anywhere. The van’s fine.

The people whose driveway it is come out. They are elderly and sympathetic. They say it’s the third time it’s happened or maybe the forth or the fiftieth. The council need to put up a sign. The van driver is hopping around. He wants us out of there before the police arrive. We exchange insurance details. He says it always turns into a pantomime if the police get there.

In the end he drives me home in his white van. The old people call a garage for the car. There’s someone else there, I think, as well as N. They’d been worried about me. I’d left on the drop of a shoulder, needed to turn and go. Didn’t know where I was going. Looking for air, looking to break something.

N fixes the van driver a cup of tea. I’m a bit dazed. The van driver sits in a corner. He’s short-haired, middle-aged, sensible Yorkshireman. He talks about the idiots there are out there, driving, He says you wouldn’t believe some of the idiots he’s seen behind the wheel of a car. I don’t know why he’s still here, sitting in one of the uncomfortable chairs we never sit in, drinking tea.

When he leaves, everything’s OK again. Crashes are physical. They heal the abscesses of the mind. All is soothed. The Red Renault will be remade. I will hitchhike out past the high security prison to rescue it.

We are young. We laugh at our craziness. The places it leads us to. The damage it causes and the damage it has not caused.

hacienda

The little red Renault is our umbilical cord to the world. After the crash, we spend a month dependent on public transport. It curtails your social life. The red Renault doesn’t like the cold of Winter. Sometimes I spend an hour trying to get the points warm, smoothing them, tending them, in the hope we might get into the library, out of our retreat.

One weekend we drive across the Penines to Manchester. Manchester feels like a great, bleak civilisation, in comparison to our backwater. It’s big and messy and full of people we’ve never seen before. We stay in Charlotte’s room, hang out, and explore.

Saturday night we go to the Hacienda. It’s probably 1985. Just about the heyday. The club is full, but not rammed. It’s big and shiny and maybe it rivals the New York Clubs she’s talked about, only it’s got that sense of grit which makes it unique.

Some band is playing. Who knows how famous they might have been. There’s some dancing. An Egyptian makes a move and she flirts. Charlotte knows a few people.

The change happens in the space of a song. The space isn’t fun anymore. It’s a big warehouse full of noise. The noise is inescapable. There’s nothing worse than being trapped in a club. The only thing that can make it worse is if the girl or the boy you’re with wants to stay. Then you’re a misfit and a killjoy. The Egyptian has money. She attracts money. It’s all a charade, some men never realise when they’re wasting their time, or their time’s being wasted, but the charade drags on. The Hacienda loses its cool.

The next day we lie in late. It’s a treat to be in a foreign city for a change. Out of our little village. Away from everything. Old York’s too small. It’s suffocating us. We know it. We need space and people and room to flourish. We need big clubs you can get lost in and hate and dream about going back to another night, when it will all be perfect.

kid

I go to give the kids final feedback on their short plays. It’s been a month since I last saw them. They are pulled out of class for their five minute one-to-ones. One is a mop-topped blond haired twelve year old. His play was set in 1170. It was about a youth who wanted to go and fight in the Crusades, but his father disapproves. He fights a few battles and wins his father’s approval.

I ask the kid what he thinks of his play. He tells me he thinks it’s rubbish. I ask him why he thinks that. He says he doesn’t know. He just thinks it’s rubbish. I disagree. We discuss the play. I tell him what I like about it, and some things he might think about changing.

At the end I ask if he has any questions. There’s a question there but he can’t ask it. It requires cajoling. Finally he looks up, uncertainly. He says, hesitantly: Do you really think it’s not rubbish?

tomorrow

Which is actually today now. The thirteenth of December. I am looking forward to today. I feel better about it. Maybe sobriety has something to be said for it.

winchester 3

Winchester scarves are long, loose-knitted creations, given out with colours for particular achievements. The scarves are called pussies. You can win a first XI pussy for sports. Or you can win a pussy for belonging to the backgammon society. One of the most treasured pussies is that of the croquet club.

J, one of the boys in the dormitory, has a Rasta pussy, in Rasta colours. J belongs to the Rasta society. J plays Bob Marley, but he also plays Burning Spear and Augustus Pablo and more. He also plays The Raincoats and The Slits. And Bauhaus and Extreme German Noise bands. He plays PIL very loudly.

J’s mother lived with Steve Winwood from The Spencer Davis Group. He grew up for a while in a cottage in the Cotswolds where clothes were banned. J’s father is a filmmaker who he rarely sees. J’s father has unseen footage of The Beatles tripping on a plane on the way to India. There are photos of J with three of The Beatles, the only one missing is the one he loves.

J sits and plays me this music. Which is alien to me. I have to learn to love it.

J is obsessive. He gets crushes on people, which lead nowhere and mean nothing. One night he believes he’s offended me and comes and sits by my bed asking me to forgive him. He hasn’t offended me so I can’t. The whole thing’s embarrassing.

J continues to obsess about people. Another night, years later, he’s very depressed, because the person he’s obsessing about has been ignoring him. He finds solace in The Rites of Spring, which he plays louder than he used to play PIL. He talks me through each beat. When the strings come in he compares them to a school of little fish.

J becomes more idiosyncratic as he gets older. Soon after we leave Winchester he takes to visiting the sites of power stations and drives me down to one in Somerset for the day. Both the bonnet and the roof of his 2CV fly off at regular intervals. He rolls cigarettes as he drives. Another time he locks me out of his Cambridge rooms at three in the morning and I have to spend two hours in a phone box fending off the fen cold. Years later, I run into him at the ICA.

Last year there was a short film of his on Channel 4. He was hitch-hiking around Britain, interviewing the people who picked him up. Several of them talked about suicide. They responded to his erudite tones with tragic stories. No matter how amazing their stories, J appeared neither to be phased, nor inclined to show them any mercy.

He’s out there, somewhere, in this city.

winchester 2

The teacher looks like Father Christmas. He’s invited the student round for sherry. They’re going to talk about his Oxbridge exam, or something like that. The teacher bellows instead of talking. He’s a cult figure. He knows it. A very large fish in the pond. He’s had some good ideas in his time, but he’s so bored of teaching. Fed up to the back teeth. He likes some students. Most are witless.

The teacher gets a bit drunk. It’s an Autumn evening. The student is old enough to be allowed a few drinks. The teacher looks at the student. There’s not much discussion of literature. There’s not much discussion about anything. From time to time the teacher bellows the word: Fletch!

A slug has appeared on the teacher’s carpet. Not a snail, but a slug. There’s no knowing how it got there. It knuckles forward like an embarrassed gate crasher.

The teacher suggests they go for a walk. They walk out onto the open wastes of the playing field. It’s a clear, crisp night. The teacher starts talking about Wordsworth. He says that Wordsworth understood things. He looks around him and the lines sprout in his mind. Lines he’s taught so many times.

The teacher waddles in a roly poly way towards the boy. He grabs at him. The boy is taken by surprise. Father Christmas is trying to hug him. It’s been a long time since the boy’s believed in Father Christmas, but this association, and the meaty arms trying to surround him, are repulsive.

The boy, who is not so much of a boy, breaks away. He runs across the fields. The great voice resonates in the chill.

Fletch! It booms.
Fletch! The voice echoes across the darkness.

winchester 1

A prefect comes in, wanders round, checks everything’s in order. The older boys prattle with amusement. They have been there no more than two terms more than the new boys (called new men) but they could be ten years older. They are full of banter and jokes. The new men lie silent, apprehensive in the bed of the first night of their new life.

The lights are turned out and the prefect leaves the room. The chatter rekindles. With glee, the old hands begin the game. They introduce the theme. The theme is notions. New man’s notions.

There is a debate. Someone somewhere is not so keen on the idea of new man’s notions. Others are excited. The new men listen. They don’t know what this thing will be. All they know is that it is not something they are supposed to enjoy.

A new man, a pipsqueak, pipes up. He starts talking. The older boys, no more than a year older, but seeming so much more so, snort at him. The new man supports the lone voice of dissent. The new man is ridiculed. Told to be quiet. The debate is suspended. It will be resumed the next night.

At breakfast, someone asks the new man if that was him talking up last night. The new man says sheepishly, it was. The older boy tells him well done.

The next night it’s decided the notions should go ahead. They are cut off when a prefect walks in and switches on the lights. When he does, the new man is half way down the aisle of the dormitory, wearing no clothes. He runs into bed. The older boys hoot and shout. New man’s notions is summarily cancelled for that term’s intake.

+++

Years later that same prefect, who is now a doctor, becomes a tenant in my parents rented flat. He moves in with his young family. He doesn't seem to remember anything about me. We stand by the stream and try to remember the spanish word for trout. It's trucha.

the best view in london

Makes the place look like a Turner, with the cathartic light of winter collapsing over spires and towers and all is some kind of gothic fairyland, as night surreptitiously annuls the view which is to be treasured all the more for fact that one more time it slips into nothingness.

islington

Night reaches fork. One way lies Guilty Pleasures, and friends, the other way, the solitary opposite.
A yellow bag of saffron leaps through the night air and is cleanly caught.
The walk home leads past Vietnamese, Georgian, Bolivian, Colombian, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Equadorean, Irish, others.
A can of tuna is all that's required. That and some pear juice and the hope the key turns in the lock, which it does.

old age

Who are you? What are you doing here? Get out! I don't want you here! Dorothy looks at her husband. She's angry. She stares archly over the top of her spectacles. George, tell him to leave. I don't want him in my house. George looks at me and he shrugs.

A minute later Dorothy is laughing. She's telling me about Baden Baden.


+++


George gets ill and Dorothy has to go into a home for two weeks. The home is chock full of people, sitting in silent lines, watching television. They look defeated. Dorothy asks me to take her with me. She wants to go home. She asks me what they've done with George. She's angry with George. She doesn't understand why he's left her here. All she wants to do is go home. As I get up to go, she reaches out and tugs at my sleeve, and says, Please, darling, just take me with you.


+++

Dorothy dies peacefully in Winchester hospital. We all think that George will get a second wind, now he doesn't have to care for her, day in, day out. He doesn't. He's losing energy. His skin gows pallid. It greyens. Even going to the shops tires him out. He has to stop for breath on the way back. It upsets him. He's tired of it all. He knows it. Less than a year later, George dies in a hospital on the outskirts of London.

+++

George told me about the things he used to do when he was young. How he loved speed. How they'd hook a stick to the back of the tram in Ipswich and let it pull their bicycle along. How he'd cycle to the coast before breakfast for a swim in the sea and then come back again to work. How exciting it was to drive a car for the first time. Dorothy would always tell him to go slower. He never did.

steve 6

He’s come back to the flat after his shift in Threshers. It’s a few days after Sedley cooked the squid. He says he’s met this girl and he really likes her. She’s been in the shop a couple of times. She gave him her phone number and now he’s lost it. He doesn’t know what to do. I tell him he’s crazy. How can you just lose a phone number of someone you really fancy. He relaxes a bit. He says its OK. He knows she’ll come back. He even knows what she’s going to buy. They end up going out together for about five years.

steve 5

We’re in a club in Shepherd’s Market which Dessie goes to. It’s a Tuesday night or something. We’re the only white boys there. There are no women there. Men stand round in circles. Someone walks into the middle of the circle and makes some moves, then walks out again. People stare at us. We don’t belong, but we’re with Dessie, so it’s fine. We do our own thing.

steve 4

He’s wearing a pinstripe suit. He’s sweating. The marquee’s bearing down on him. He looks like he’s not enjoying himself. It’s the first time he’s ever given a speech in his life. It doesn’t come easy. He’ll enjoy himself later.

steve 3

It’s about two in the morning. I’ve been drinking. Steve says he knows what’ll sort me out. He gives me some speed. I say, Steve, I’m not happy about this. It’s a rented car. I’m not even the one renting it. Steve says if I don’t want to go we won’t go.

The roads are empty and narrow, with parked cars on either side. The police car’s just sitting there. Steve sinks into his seat. He tells me to just be cool and I tell him that’s what I’m doing.

We don’t pay to get in. Steve never pays. He always knows someone I’ve never met before.

On the way back, a few hours later, I drive around the Elephant and Castle roundabout not once not twice but three times.

steve 2

There’s a pan on the outside window ledge in the Crystal Palace flat. The flat has a low ceiling, painted gold, that cavcd in once. Kat’s not there. We used to get drunk on sloe gin and dance to Police and Thieves. The pan’s been on the ledge for weeks. There’s stuff growing in it. Stuff growing out of it. We both know every day the pan doesn’t get cleaned it’s going to get nastier when it does. But neither of us ever cleans the pan. We only stay a few weeks in the flat and then we have to move on.

steve 1

I meet him in the bar in Beak Street, quite late. He fixes me a few drinks. Then we go to Turnmills. Turnmills is underground. It’s a dungeon. It has a high vaulted ceiling and a long bar. There’s about half a dozen others. The only ones I know are Dessie and Adam, an Australian model.

Steve gives me a pill and tells me to take it. The music’s loud. Steve tells me not to expect anything in a hurry. Nothing happens. The music’s too loud to talk. The club’s only half full. Adam is getting entwined with a blonde. They’re all over each other. Adam’s laughing a lot. Steve asks me if anything’s happening and I say I don’t think so. He says the pills are shit.

Turnmills goes on and on and on. The music never improves. I lose Steve. Later I spot him. He’s having a kip in a casement window up near the street. People ask me if I’m OK. I’m fine. They ask me again. I’m still fine. I walk around. I’m wide awake but nothing’s happening.

Steve’s there. He says we should get out. We walk out into the dawn. The air feels good. We go into a church yard round the corner. White blocks of medieval stone; gravestones; concealment. We don’t talk. Later Steve says that was the best bit of the night.

We meet up with Dessie and Adam and a few others and walk back to the bar in Soho. Dessie’s talking about the toys you used to get in a cereal box. I can’t remember any. We get to the bar and have a beer. Steve asks me what music we should play and I tell him we should put on Nevermind.

self-evident

So it turns out the man I’ve never met before sitting on the same white sofa as I am and talking to me about Gambia lives in Dorset Road. About two minutes walk from where I would have been living if I wasn’t now staying in the place where he will also be staying tonight, in George’s Road, on the other side of town from Dorset Road. Which is the place which contains the white sofa and the co-incidence and also another co-incidence which was revealed the last time I sat on this white sofa, a co-incidence to do with asado and Buenos Aires which has nothing to do with this co-incidence and this man who comes from the Gambia via Dorset Road. Which is a long way from Dorset, just as this road is a long way from George or even where George used to live.

dumb waiter

In the play the dumb waiter is a mechanism for delivering information, rather than food. Pinter never allows the audience to know who is manipulating or even operating the dumb waiter.

+++

The Anglo handyman knocks something together. A basic contraption which is high enough for the messages to be placed on a tray so that they can appear to convincingly descend to where the shutters are opened. Danny and Matthew get into complex discussions with the handyman, which I don’t understand. If the dumb waiter doesn’t work properly, then all the rehearsal is in vain. When the eventual structure is set up in the studio theatre, it looks rickety, but does the job.

Next the dumb waiter needs a dumb waiter to operate it. There are two candidates. One is a flaxen haired, hard drinking Norwegian. The other is a nineteen year old Uruguayan. The Norwegian doesn’t seem all that bothered. The Uruguayan gets the job.

We have a while to rehearse with the dumb waiter. Rehearsals are in the morning. Sometimes the human dumb waiter comes in with a cocaine hangover and a grumpy disposition, but she’s attentive, she knows the lines as well as the actors, and the play can depend on her.

The actors lose their nerve and regain their nerve. The audience seems to get it, in spite of the language gap. The show is extended. One night the director operates the dumb waiter so the dumb waiter can watch.

The Dumb Waiter goes on tour. In Paysandu, there are two grand pianos on stage which cannot be moved. The final black-out can only be achieved by the director giving a sign to the geriatric janitor, who hobbles down the side of the theatre and cuts the power for the whole theatre.

In Florida it’s the director’s 28th birthday. The power in the whole town goes, and the stars light up above. In San Jose the show plays an opera house. Wherever it goes, The Dumb Waiter gets audiences, laughs and puzzlement. Does the play resonate, a mere ten years after the fall of a military dictatorship? Perhaps. Perhaps it would resonate no matter what.

After every show, the dumb waiter is packed up and placed on a truck, to be taken to its next destination. By the final show, it’s on the point of collapse. When the short tour of the provincial backwaters is over, the dumb waiter is chopped up and used for an asado in the dumb waiter’s garden. The dumb waiter delivers chorizo and steak to the actors and the rest of the company. For the first and last time it fulfils its nominative function.

pinter

Pinter has coffee brewing in the corner. He doesn't mind if you get up and walk across his study to help yourself to another cup. Pinter listens whilst Horacio tells him at length about his plans for a rock 'n roll version of Peer Gynt. Horacio is a director. He likes to talk. Pinter is a playwright. You can hear him listening.

Pinter replies to my letter with a hand-written letter of his own. He offers the best kind of help. Pinter says the story about the torturer who became a lecturer is fascinating. Pinter says the play is terrifying. Pinter writes in a confident sprawl.

Pinter sends his poems to someone I know. She gets the poem out and we read it. The poem's terrible, she says, and she's right.

There's an old couple in the queue for the cinema. It takes a moment to place the old man. It's five in the afternoon at the Panton Street Odeon. The film's an overated piece of sci-fi. I think about going over and saying hello, but don't. In the cinema, I turn and watch him and his wife. He looks uncomfortable. They don't look like they belong, in this public space, watching this film that means less than it claims to. I decide to say hello when the film ends. But midway through, they leave.

Someone tells me they knew Pinter's assistant. Her first job in the morning was to put the champagne on ice.

soup

When George cooked a can of soup, he'd always add a drop of milk to the bottom of the emptied can and swirl it around, then add to the pot. A habit I excercised just the other minute.

For years I never thought much of soup. Then, in my second year working in Old Street, I discovered it as an alternative to Ciabattas, Paninis, Lasagna or Sandwiches. From then on soup was the core of my lunchtime diet.

In the year or so that I wrote from home, I kept this habit up, eating at least three cans of tomato soup a week. This is a phase which only came to an end earlier this year. Yet, already, when I fix myself a can of tomato soup for lunch, I do so with a sense of nostalgia.

sleep like a baby

Early morning frost is just frozen water droplets.
Marzipan is just a kind of paste made from ground almonds and (mainly) sugar.
Rainbows are just a trick of the light.
The golden fleece is simply a myth.
Pamplemousse is the French word for grapefruit.
In a moment of crisis, a good friend's strong shoulders can help lift you that bit higher.

finchley

To get to Finchley you must pass through the deepest strata of the London soil. As though you are a miner lost in the pit o bones. The journey drags you like a fish caught on the fly, kicking and wailing through neverland until you burst through the surface into the dark light of the land o souls. You have reached Finchley. The morning will be deep and crisp and even. The bones which contain the soul will have slumbered. On the margin of the North Circular, roads bloom like a phalanx of camelias; Davendra croons again; the stop start spider spins its speckled web.

job number 78

It’s Christmas party time, but I haven’t been invited. I’m nothing more than a temp. A legal secretary, they call it. The job involves sitting in a basement in the Gloucester Road and trying to stay awake. I work with an obnoxious man who will be rich one day, and enjoys playing the drums. He is a fervent follower of the band Rush. Also a friendly Irish woman. I hardly ever see any of the lawyers. They work upstairs and occasionally request photocopying. In the afternoons the papers have all been read. We lie our heads on the long wooden bench and try to ignore the drumming.

Someone fixes for me to go to the Christmas party, held in a hotel on Queens Gate. In a party everyone’s neutral. I make friends with a pretty seventeen year old and we request James Brown from the DJ. He plays Sex Machine, like they all do. Later it’s learnt that following the party one of the hotshot young lawyers in their fancy ties does something which constitutes extreme sexual harassment, for which he will be sacked.

There’s no way of getting home to Rayner’s Lane. I share a cab with the Irish girl and her flatmate to their place in Golders Green. Her flatmate’s a pretty, shaven-haired Dane called Maybrit.

Back at Golders Green, Maybrit takes me to her bed. We kiss and crash out together. I keep my long johns on. (Long johns are George’s idea for keeping the Winter at bay.) In the morning, Maybrit extracts me from my long johns. She heads for her bookshelf where she keeps condoms. By the time she gets back, maybe two seconds, the insulation is back in place. Maybrit is peeved. She asks me what’s wrong with me. Am I gay? Do I have some kind of problem with her?

Maybrit and I keep in touch. She tells me she gets suicidal from time to time. Too beautiful not to. There’s a poem about it in the back of a Tolstoy Penguin Classic in Winchester somewhere. At one point she’s severely ill. I visit her in the Royal Free, bringing grapes. We lose touch. I get a call from her. She’s going back to Copenhagen. Land of jazz bars and proper pubs. We meet up before she goes over an afternoon beer in an eightees bar on a Covent Garden corner.

north

Other place I have lived, North of the river:

Rayners Lane: geraniums on the landing; a musty, old-person smell; a garden I'd played in all my life. Catching the midnight Piccadilly tube back after another stint in the Covent Garden General Store, watching amused as a little aspirational fascist explained how to stack a shelf of shortbread in the appropriate fashion. Coming back to Rayners Lane once last time after George died, and suddenly the grief hit me in a red phone box: the empty flat, shorn of its hard-earned sense of life.

Fulham: a woman who became a TV executive complaining about money and the fact that I'd forgotten to switch the answerphone on. Getting the 14 bus back from South Kensington. A cupboard that was falling to pieces.

Islington: a shed with a leaky tin roof. Luckily it was Summer. Bequeathed to me by Bruce who'd lost the love of his life to Reilly, Ace of Spies (also known as Sam Neill) "I mean, mate, I never stood a chance." The landlord who wrote books about subterranean London, permanantly stoned, sitting out in his garden, smiling benevolently.

Plaistow: freezing cold all the time. Nothing there. Tina and Arita raising eyebrows. A place that felt unsafe. A long walk from the station. Hinterland.

+++

Never lived in any of them for much more than six months at a time, although lived on and off at Rayners Lane for two years. The North never had a strong grip on me. See whether it's any different this time.

shaving

Sometimes feels like a chore; sometimes feels like a kind of purification.

nomad

Mr Collins plays me a track and asks if I know it. Then another. I get six out of eight. Elvis Costello. The Jam. Bauhaus. Joy Division. A Czech band from 1978.The Clash. If I had had to catch the tube I would not have had the chance not to recognise these things that I recognise.

rydings

In a home from home, called Hoxton Square, a man castigates me. He tells me XY and Z, things I don’t understand. He tells me I don’t understand the things he’s saying and he’s right. More to the point, I don’t know why he’s saying them.

He’s someone I’m fond of, and whose music I’m currently listening to. I told him to be careful of his bones. He swears and shimmies. He’s not a happy bunny, I stand and listen. It’s my farewell do. My wife is far away. My friends have no idea. He turns and says he’s leaving. He’s given himself the first word and the last word. I am a wall for his fury.

Sometimes, you’re fond of someone, which inclines you to say what you think. And the fact that you have this inclination is the reason they are fond of you. But the moment of convergence can only lead to an unwanted angst.

opposite execution dock

On the other bank, there are four torches. Their lights picks out things we cannot see. Mr C and I speculate. Cocklers? Mafia? Renegade coppers? The lights move forward in fits and starts. Thames fireflies. We watch them from the same place Judge Jeffries used to eat his lunch whist monitoring the fate of those he’d condemned to death by drowning.

earplugs

Everywhere I sleep people offer me ear plugs. I constantly refuse them, scared of what they will inveigle into my dreams.

roberto carlos

Each of us is given a horse to ride. It’s only the third time in my life I’ve ridden. The first, as a child on a Northampton farm, I was thrown. The second was thirty years later, when a tearaway Uruguayan filly frothed at the mouth and tried to remove both saddle and rider. This time the horse is more accommodating. We strike up a good relationship, cantering across the campo, spotting macaws and what look like flamingos but are not. The horse bobs and weaves and swerves with grace. As is only appropriate given the horse’s name.

rsc

The director has fought and won his battle. The design budget will bend to his will. Thirty wooden horses are commissioned.

The actors know this. They know the horses are accounted for. They will not have to act horses on stage. All, the same, when the director tells the whole cast to go away and discover their inner horse, they do so.

Each one tries to find a little paddock all their own in the rehearsal room. Self-consciously, glancing at neighbouring centaurs, they neigh and they prance and they whinny.

After fifteen minutes the director reins his herd in. He turns to one of the older actors and asks him to show the company his horse.

The actor thinks for a moment, then says he’d rather not.

The director says he really thinks the company would like to see his horse.

The older actor doesn’t believe in his inner horse. He declines to offer it for a second time.

The director does not want to crack the whip but he will if he has to.

The older actor sighs. He knows he ought not to be doing this, but he’s seen the younger actors’ horses, they were vital and alive and equine, and he knows his doesn’t compare. He wasn’t trained in how to be a horse. His horse is more like a mule.

For the final time, the director repeats the instruction.

The actor is broken. His horse sidles across the rehearsal room. It feels like he’s being taking to the knacker’s yard.

When he’s done, the company clap, and the director turns to a more suitable horse which prances leggily, and then horse after horse does its show-pony tricks. The director is satisfied.

As they leave the rehearsal for lunch, the older actor, feeling sheepish and foolish all at the same time, wonders how much it costs to make a wooden horse.

george

Gets up at half past five. Always has things to do. Wakes me up at seven. Has cooked me breakfast. Sausage, mushrooms, an egg, tomatoes, fried bread, toast. Sometimes bacon, sometimes black pudding. Makes me tea. Washes up. Polishes the arch of the sole of his shoes. Calls me soldier. Walks me out into the crisp Rayners Lane air as I head off to work. Used to say, when I was a child: Psssh! You’re a horse

wish I could be like…

For the second time this Autumn, my senior flight attendant is the redoubtable Christian, ensuring my comfort on a return flight from a city whose symbol is a bear standing on its hind legs.

Christian has the demeanour of a child thrust into the role of a teacher. He takes his job very seriously indeed. There’s a hint of the failed actor about him. His clipped tones elaborate in detail the delights of low-cost air travel, the opportunities it allows him and us to expand our minds and cast our hearts beyond the clouds.

Christian is everywhere. Offering advice, travel tips, manipulating easy-puppets, playing the accordion, mixing cocktails, blessing babies, levitating, establishing supra-national harmony.

He is the David Watts of European skies.

the sound of windchimes

Wakes me up. I must be back in Brixton.

snippet

Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by 'the book', are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the knowledge obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is of what to observe.