special people

You can't really say that anyone has wasted their talents. A talent is a gift, something bestowed rather than worked for. If it comes attached to an obligation, or it would not be a gift, but a payment in advance, or bribe.
A talent should never be a duty. Just because someone can draw fluently, sing like an angel or move like Bojangles, does not mean that they should devote their lives to doing so for the entertainment and elevation of others if what they really, really want is to sit in a hole watching reruns of Bilko, Cheers, Soap, Frasier and The Simpsons, plus the complete works of Laurel and Hardy – and indeed who could blame me?

Why Brock won't be watching the World Cup

An extract from an unfinished novel based on The Wind in the Willows

He leaned over and removed the offending image from his sight by yanking the plug from its socket. 'Bugry!' he boomed. 'God, how I hate it. Homosexuality with an incomprehensible offside law. Still, what do you expect from a public school game?'
Molly raised a brow, and opened his mouth to enquire, but Brock had moved swiftly and inevitably into grumblemode, and mounted his hobby-horse. ‘What really gets me,' he said, snapping three Rizlas from the packet, 'is that they make you shove your face up another man’s arse, or wrap your arms round his naked thighs and pull him to the ground, and then some cunt in tracksuit bottoms with a sagging arse tells you it's character-building. Maybe it is, maybe it builds characters like him, but who actually wants to become a sadistic closet case with a degree in Fascistic Pusillanimity who thinks communal showering, untamed facial hair, swilling fucking ‘ale’ and bellowing tuneless obscenities while wallowing with other blokes in a bath full of lukewarm scummy water give him the semblance of a real man, rather than that of a sad little shit prepared to undergo humiliation and discomfort in order not to feel excluded and for the chance to take some revenge for his miserable life by raking or punching some other cunt in a ruck? We could pity them, I suppose, but I don’t. They’re all cunts and they should get off my fucking telly when I want to watch the racing.
‘And the people who pay to watch them are even worse. Braying shaggy-faced twats in car coats and sheepskins, all “well played” and hip flasks and four-wheel drives. And that fucking Chariot shit. What’s that about?’ Spittle flecked the corners of his mouth.
Time to change the subject, thought Molly. ‘It’s not quite like that in Rugby League you know.’
‘Yeah, there’s better pies for a start’ said Dobbin, who was, after all, from The North, and was therefore an authority on such things.

L’avenir, c'est moi - Molly lays it down

An extract from an unfinished novel

'My entire family, down through the years, have taken it in turns to make sacrifices for the next generation and the glorious future, killing their own dreams so their children can have some of their own. Well, now the future for which all those sacrifices has been made is here. I’m the last of the line, bar some distant cousins in Bristol; my grandad’s brothers got slaughtered on the Somme, dad was the only male of his generation, so it’s all distilled down to me, the guardian of the Mollicroft legacy, the avatar of dynastic hope.
'Well, I have absolutely no intention of passing on my genes, let alone the hopes and fortunes attendant upon the family name. As soon as I get my hands on it, I’m going to fucking spend it, I’m going to piss it away in uselessness, and attempt to experience all those things my forefathers didn’t because they were too poor, too stupid, too working class, too fucking decent; I’m going to live for them all – take those drinks, shuck those responsibilities, cut those strings and dynamite my bridges behind, ahead and in front. I’m putting a headlock on hedonism, opening every orifice and organ to excitement and harvesting experience in the highways and hedgerows and anywhere else beginning with aitch. I intend to go out with a smile on my face and tales to tell that’ll pin back the ears of the dead.’
Jim looked at him, vaguely stupefied by his friend's sudden and vehement eloquence. ‘Well, I suppose some poor sod’s got to do it.’

The strange demise of Biff's mum

Extract from an unfinished novel

In idle moments Biff would wonder where she had been going that day, when she had left her apartment building in just her shoes, underwear and a pristine white housecoat, purse in hand, no make-up, not even a bit of lippy, rushing out the door at the exact moment the hoist gave way. And then... well, you see it in cartoons, don’t you? In some of them it positively rains pianos and safes.
Of course, the ’toon usually slaps itself back into shape, if only to get its head blown off three seconds later; but even a glancing blow from a 1930s wood cabinet Rockola jukebox with 10 meters of gravitational acceleration behind it is extremely inimical to human health. And there was nothing glancing about the blow delivered by the Rockola with Mrs Margaret O’Toole’s name on it. Biff’s mother took the full whack on her shoulder-blades; instant raspberry pavlova.
Of course, the removal company payed up big-time, and there was life insurance, too ... he had enough to buy the house and some over.
Incidentally, did you know that Rockola had nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll? it was the name of the people who ran the company. Czechs I think.

lost paragraphs looking for a rodeo to join

He was the sort of man who would buy a Martian Schoolgirls single simply to separate his alphabetically-arranged collections of Martha and the Vandellas and the Marvelettes, which had a tendency to miscegenate enthusiastically when juxtaposed.

Autumn afternoon, overcast, last hour before sundown. Cold air softening all colours, lights coming on on near and distant rises, bluesilver and sodiumgold, the walls of factories and houses Cezanne-blocking the shape of the hill in pastels of plaster and old brick, muted;

'You always worry that they’re going to leave you for someone with a bigger record collection. '

Molly sighed. Not an inward or modest exhalation, but a gust of disgust that rippled the papers on the desk, set the wind chimes to tinkling and incidentally knocked a passing bluebottle out of its buzzing torporous orbit to spin and right itself again on another course entirely. This it followed with a droning indifference that discomfited Molly further.

‘The root passion of rock and roll is the yearning and hunger for the joy that comes only with a first time. It always sounds simply thrilling and affirmative to the young, who are still running the gamut of new experiences, and increasingly elegiacal to those whose youthful fires are flickering.’

His words wreathed upwards in curlicues of smoke, tracing baroque lines in blue and gray in the eddies of their combined and communal breathing, the frenzies of insects, and the odd ripple conjured chaotically from a hurricane half a world away.

You remember what it’s like being a teenager, and having to deal with hot shame and embarrassment on a daily basis?

‘I’m tired and hungry, and on the verge of being exhausted and ravenous. I’m also fucking angry. For fuck’s sake make me a fucking sandwich.

From Dream Diary 1992

Buy some kind of jamboree bag/sweetie packet/hippy lucky dip. Find a head of grass in the bottom, shaped like Madonna and child, with a huge shiny seed where the Baby’s head should be. Begin to chew on it - a taste of sticky orange (of Haliborange chewable tablets in fact), blooms crunchingly in my mouth, I take it out, stuff it into a film container. Holly and Clive there, ask me what I’m doing. I explain. Supplies are seemingly inexhaustible. I’m worried about being caught, trying to change the nature of the thing.
Buy another of those hippy jamboree bags, take it home. Break open the pack and out tumble masses of pieces of hash, far too much for the containers, all different kinds. I’ve hit the motherlode, much to the delight of my companions

From Dream Diary 1993

Last night I was walking, turned the sharp corner into Whiplash Avenue. Johnny M was there, later Keith in his cricket whites and cap, we were on the way to Spurs v Arsenal. Further on I realized that, though I’d been to the ground earlier that day, I’d forgotten to buy a ticket. Go anyway, to get scalped, but the crowd’s below capacity. ‘Got a ticket for a genuine supporter?’ I ask, and the first guy’s got a fistful – they’re pink. Permissible tickets, no charge. I go in, to try and catch up with Keith, who no longer has a coat over his whites, and has fallen in a clownish heap of long limbs on the cinder track, cut strings & arse in the air.
& if that weren’t bad enough, the night before got into some sort of war involving my bentwood chairs, which ended up splintered and smashed in spite. I hurled abuse and something else at my tormentor as I ran from the house (big, townish) and went off along what looked like East St, Faversham, munching on a cold roast chicken, but feeling justified, when I suddenly (& as you can imagine, shockingly) realized – I was Morrissey! Enough to wake anyone up. And him a vegetarian, too!
Must stop laying off the dope if this keeps happening

a musical moment

I bought the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling the day it came out – I’d long sold my soul to Spector – and I’d heard it many times before this time I’m talking about now, which must have been very early in 1965, deep winter, we’ve just moved into a new house, and I’m listening to the record, label in that classic black and silver London livery, on my spiffing new top-of the range valve record player that gives off this characteristic, rather comforting but not exactly fragrant smell of dust being incinerated on the valves as they heated up, and I happened to glance up from whatever mundanity I was engaged in and look out of the uncurtained window into a dark clear crisp cold star-bright night of deep winter (no lights in our street). I was struck by that perfect marriage of sound, sight and sensation. Icy purity within and without. It was probably my first rock ’n’ roll epiphany.
Thirty years later, I play the sound and I can still feel that prickle in the neck and the shudder in my spine.
Other records are not just one time, but a collection of moments, a distillation of them, a feeling, and ever now and then you come across a vinyl madeleine that sends you spinning back, unstuck in time, to somewhere and somewhen long forgotten.

Hymn to the God of Love (Chicago)

[from a Diary entry 20 March 1970)

It's spring days like these,
Fresh and full and suddenly long,
That make you want to embrace the world.

But the world is so distant, so large,
So you turn to embrace your woman.
And there isn't one.

So you play the pintable all day long.

12:19:04 The Days are just packed

26:03:03

No point in trying to fill in the blanks since the last time, at least not now.
I thought I had run out of tickets, and I may well have done so in a meaningful way, but inspired by a night home alone to come (its 16.45) and the fact that it is (probably – brain black spot, this) Bill’s birthday, I thought I’d check the stash, and Lo! Two of the buggers, of great age and unknown provenance.
So I neck one with no hesitation, and not much faith in a result, and go off for the ritual cleansing, nobly forgetting I’m due to be up early to visit [my therapist].

*   *   *

The circus is back in town, but the tigers are tired and the clowns can’t seem to crack wise.
(Bizarrely, I’d rather dance.)
The whip’s lost its crack, the white horse is black, and the elephant pooped in the pies.

Remember the golden rule; if you can actually wonder whether or not you are tripping, you almost certainly aren’t. But maybe grass and guarana will provide an adequate simulacrum.
*   *   *
A note says: PATGOD [ie chapter 7 of TWITW] Masters = Pan
If only.
Playing with parentheses; is this a symptom? It might be in a less chronically punctuational a patient (no man then), but I sometimes [often] do this when I’m just working up a sweat. I ain’t no fucking lightweight. I can cane it or leave it alone. Sometimes it’s Hemingway, every comma a concession. Then it’s tottering edifices of {inter}dependent clauses girdered for bear, bellying and sweating and cursing, snorting for escape into the sunnier uplands where the colon roams and ampersands spring from noun to noun, yet forced to circle forever in the …
[syntactical crash and collapse]

*   *   *

‘You sound like you’ve seen the Promised Land.’
‘Seen it? I’m looking at it right now.’

*   *   *

…dubious gloaming of umbrous question marks...

*   *   *

Something uniquely grounding about a bellyful of vegetable curry, though the added chillies bring fire, water and – later, doubtless, air – to the elemental party.
Speaking of which; there’s nothing about a one man party when the one man is as fascinating as this particular party, yessirree Bob Dobbs, ahoy there skipper, etc., mumbumbles to a stop

*   *   *

…such as those that occur over such conundra as whether half-wits have semi-colons, or who won the Apos Trophy in (kindly leave the stage, in fact, all of you, out of here this minute, this sentence is going to blow...

*   *   *

So what now at eight o’clock? More music, more drugs, more lying down? Nah, done that. A picture show would be nice. And I’d better set the video. Even my pupils can’t quite seem to make up their mind.
We can only have our own enlightenment.
Whoever hawks illumination (save for Mr Mazda and the equally blameless filament-flogging hordes who should accept their exemption from this argument with equanimity) does not have the precious quality he seeks to sell...
Black mocha coffee, dark bitter chocolate, marzipan; it’s been said before, but Mmmm. And a little light hashish to coat the throat with smoky-sweet lemon-biscuit-flavoured phlegm. There’ll be good hacking in the morning.
{How many of the real peak experiences of my life haven’t involved acid? Wedding day. St Hotspur’s Day. First (and only first) love. all that comes to mind, and goes}
Must go and programme the video. (subliminal subtext. Not only can I set the video, a rare talent in anyone over 40, but I can even do when flagrantly intoxicated and full of the wild roister)
And, having done that, must go and lie down – I’ve over-eaten.
No sweeter feeling/
 than simply /
giving in.
Smooth as butter. Rich as silk. Grease stains.

*   *   *

…or perhaps not…

*   *   *

Loud sound in an enclosed space can raise the temperature. Just me and the music and the ghosts it evokes. It’s crowded in here. And no refuge in the kitchen. Unless you count washing up as a refuge. Doesn’t ring my bath, that’s foreshore. Typical, always beaching.
Yesterday [name of male friend censored], recently and, with all fond hope, permanently sundered from [name of male friend's inamorata] on the brink of a disastrous matrimony, explained over the roast beef how he has taken up rowing (he first got into it after going to the rowing club to book their facitilities for the aforementioned narrowly avoided triumph of Romantic nonsense over good counsel). ‘Typical,’ I said. ‘No sooner does his relationship break up than he’s messing about with oars.’
Hotcha.

*   *   *

…oh bugger (noises off).

back again

neglected recently owing to debt, depression, decrepitude and several other words beginning with D; the deep dark dungeons of deadly despair (hiya, hawkmoth)

Here's an image I found while rummaging through some old transparencies last night; for reasons I'm finding difficult to articulate to myself, I found it very heartening.

Image lost in the mists of photobucket

Lifestyles of the poor and addled

Redacted because of problems with photobucket

Memory Leaks

I’ve had memory leaks all my adult life. I use the phrase (which I may have stolen from someone) to describe sudden and momentary dislocations of consciousness, when I am struck by a single image from my past that is accompanied by an emotional force that can stop me in my tracks, but which generally fades as quickly as a dream under assault from an alarm clock, leaving just an impression, an aftertaste.

I’m not talking about memories of peak experiences, those moments of epiphany, ecstacy or loving tenderness that anyone would treasure, or the times of embarrassment, ugliness and despair that we would rather not remember at all, but that sometimes force themselves into consciousness. The  impressions I am left with are of mundane days and places, of walking down a road, entering a house, standing in a shop, sitting in an armchair watching the rain run down the window; specific, recognisable places and people and situations, but with nothing to mark them out from the other inconsequential quotidian moments that form the bulk of everyone’s lives.

When I read Slaughterhouse 5, I was struck by Billy Pilgrim’s coming ‘unstuck in time’. Perhaps this was what was happening to me, I though. I had drifted into my past life for some time, then returned a second or less after I left: the pang I felt was a sweet distillation of all the feelings I had experienced in that time, the impression merely the last thing I had experienced before I snapped back to the present.

Later, I flirted with the idea of backwards causality, that the reason these humdrum moments from the past were freighted with specialness was precisely because they would zap me in the future, lending a tinge of epiphany to the everyday; the more times a particular moment came back, the more intense the feeling. Suppose, I thought, that rather than the steady gradient or parabola usually employed to map out the passing of a lifetime, it was instead a squiggly scribble, the ravelled aftermath of a cosmic kitten pouncing on the unspooling thread. Perhaps these moments were nodes and knots in the general tangle.

Anyway, that’s by the by. I’m writing this now because I’ve had many of them over the past few weeks, bouncing me back into my past so often that yesterday I spent hours on Google Earth tracking down and looking at virtually every house I’d ever lived in, or even, at times, at the empty ground where they used to be, streets I had walked and the parks I had played in, looking for some clue to my psychic geography in the comfort of maps.

It’s possible that this increased frequency has something to do with the arrival and dispatch of the Xmas hashish, but to suggest that this is the sole cause not only insults my poetic, Romantic and self-mythologising sensibilities, but also too simplistic. I had memory leaks before I ever smoked anything, and in the last forty years of being an on and off dope fiend I’ve never noticed any particular correlation.

What led me to post this is a thought I had walking up the hill through the village, a swirl of fine rain, rivulets of red earth trickling from the front gardens of the cottages on the hill {oh, and then, as I wrote that, another leak, of walking on the very edge of the pavement an my way to my junior school along Philip Lane in Tottenham, fascinated by the way water was running through the gutters, eroding and making valleys in what I assume now must have been builder’s sand, shaping and reshaping, making shifting patterns; the accompanying feeling, an incongruous melancholy}. I’ve often heard it said that people’s lives flash before them before they die (although how do those who say this actually know?), not so much a leak as a dam burst of memory, a flood that scours the landscape and carries away all traces of life and industry. What if these memory leaks are a harbinger of this event, and their increased frequency an indication of its proximity?

Maybe it’s time to head for the higher ground.