Poem: Trump's First Year

With no frail ego that needs shoring up

by pulverising those with different views,

no love for money, power, influence,

no wish to be a headline in the news,

taught by my mother that my home was Earth,

that walls were artificial, people real,

loving colour, language and diversity,

preferring not the known, but what we feel,

I sank into a deep gloom watching Trump

campaign to take the White House, then get in.

His first year taught me that the triumph's mine,

since I will never, ever be like him.

The American Resistance: My Heroes of 2017

2017 will be known in history as the Year of Trump. Across the world. The 2016 election of this man, about whom, for me, almost no pejorative is adequate, has sent shock waves -- as well as peals of derisive laughter -- around the world. Surely, we all thought, almost everybody in every country on Earth, America can't be serious. Let's be fair: most of America isn't, and it never was. Not about him. But he got in anyway.

For me, however, the last year hasn't been about Trump. Or, he isn't the lasting memory I choose to take from the year, even though I've spent more than my fair share of it watching the news, wondering when he or his deranged mirror-image in North Korea were going to hurl us all into nuclear war; looking on in exasperation and growing outrage as he sought to delegitimise the media, wrote bigoted executive orders against Muslims, Native Americans and transgender soldiers, did nothing in response to the latest mass shootings except invoke the name of God and invite the NRA to the White House on the anniversary of Sandy Hook. This supposed leader of the free world even retweeted three unverified videos (including one proven to be fake) from my own country's British National Party, an organisation of hooligans in whose name a Labour MP was murdered.

What I choose to take from a year preoccupied with a president who, far from making America great again, who far from restoring respect for America internationally (he craves respect like the stereotype of a Mafia boss), has made his country look bellicose, uncooperative and fifty years behind the global political agenda -- what I take from the year Trump's seemingly ugly heart has dominated, is the rise of an American Resistance which we haven't seen the like of for decades. It makes me feel hope that the Trump victory was an historical aberration which will soon be corrected. And the fact that the Resistance is as much a populist movement as it is a mainstream political movement -- from this distance it seems more about the people on the streets, although there are still good men and women in Washington -- makes it all the more inspiring. I have been loosely involved with grassroots campaigns against government for decades. But most of the times it's hard to get more than twenty people to a rally.

The Resistance isn't one thing; it's a lot of things. Women have found a powerful voice in campaigns against sexual abuse popularised by activist celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan; the discourse is often controversial and divisive, but shouldn't it be? The man running the country is on tape boasting that he can 'grab [women] by the pussy' because he's famous. In Britain, which is far from a perfect democracy, that recording would have ended Trump's political career the moment it was released. We hear of arguments between activist women, and some insist they stop and present a united front. But they overlook that the inevitable consequence of finding your voice is the freedom to use it any way you fucking like. Live with it.

The 'Take a Knee' protests begun by NFL star Colin Kaepernick incensed Trump so much he tweeted and ranted publically about it for weeks. Obama, previously, had told a serviceman in a television studio that Kaepernick was exercising his constitutional right to protest against the treatment of black people in America; Trump told an audience of his own supporters that any NFL player who took a knee during the national anthem was a sonofabitch and he should be fired.

There were clear racist overtones in his comments that anybody who cared to see would see. Trump's racism, however, is not news. After a white supremacist rally resulted in the death of a young woman  protesting their odious presence in Charlottesville, Trump said there was blame on both sides for the fighting and insisted there were good people among the white supremacists. He didn't characterise them that way, of course, but he wouldn't, would he? No politician of even marginal intelligence will use derogatory language about his constituents, however accurate it is.

Trump and the American police force, according to the testimonies I've read and heard, take more credit even than those bold NFL players for imbuing many young Americans with a fierce determination to stop the brutality that makes a black man fair game if he's out on the streets after dark. The President told the cops that he supported them being much harder on the people they arrested. His comments were contradicted the next day by senior and beat officers, but the statistics speak for themselves. Too many young men become known to the world because they died in their car with a bullet in their chest.

Some people I know reject the idea that negative racial profiling is behind the killings and chokings. I think that's naïve and in itself kind of racist. But even if they are right, which seems unlikely, American police officers wouldn't be so jumpy if the country brought its gun laws in line with those of the rest of the Western world. That's not going to happen in this administration, of course, because Trump and the Republican Party are puppets of the NRA. I detect, in my reading, that there may be a grassroots gun control movement slowly growing in America though, as part of this Resistance which has flowered in 2017 on so many fronts. Let's hope that it gathers momentum and some real, positive change occurs. One wealthy lobby group shouldn't hold the safety of all Americans in its hands, any more than one bloated businessman who bought an election by lying to vulnerable people and stealing from almost everyone should be responsible for the fate of the whole world.

The American Resistance exists on other fronts, but I've run out of time to discuss them all today. The women and men taking part in it, and the ones who have died supporting it, are my heroes of 2017. I was almost grief-stricken when the country that gave me most of the books and music I love, and most of the movies I love, and some of the ideals I cherish, elected to its highest office a man I've considered a vainglorious fool for thirty years; but the Resistance showed me that America was the country I presumed all along. And now we British onlookers can organise our calendars to welcome Mr. Trump to London in 2018. It should be quite a party.

The Bishop's Wife

I like old movies. One of my favourite Freeview channels to dip in and out of is Talking Pictures, which rarely shows anything made after the early 1960s. Is my age causing me to retreat into a comfortable, sentimentalised idea of the past when I watch these films? Do I feel I understand the world they represent more than I get the one in which I actually live? Perhaps. But I loved them when I was younger too.

This morning I got up early. It was too dark to read without turning on the light in the living room, and if I turned on the light I would wake up our birds Wild Bill, Calamity Jane and Wyatt Earp. If I did that, everyone in our building would complain. So I turned on the tv instead of the light. What I saw when I scrolled through the viewing options was my favourite Christmas film 'The Bishop's Wife'. I hadn't seen it for at least five years, despite it having been, once, an annual seasonal ritual to watch it, and it had only started a few seconds ago. The next part of the morning was decided.

'The Bishop's Wife' was released in 1947. It's based on a novel I haven't read from 1928 by Robert Nathan, but it has a distinctly post-war feel about it. All of the central characters, from David Niven's Bishop to Monty Woolly's down-at-heel scholar are weary, lost, struggling with faith in some way. (Woolly says that when he passes the graveyard he feels as if he were 'apartment hunting'.)

Into this melancholy group, all of whom are linked by the 

Bishop's wife Julia (Loretta Young), who knows that her husband has lost his way in the pursuit of his ambition, comes the charming, playful, mysterious Dudley, played by Cary Grant. He appears in answer to a prayer to God that Niven makes when he feels that he may not be able to build a magnificent cathedral because of problems he has with a wealthy benefactor. Dudley presents himself to the Bishop as an angel, one who hasn't 'earned his wings yet.'

At first the Bishop struggles to believe him, as most of us would. Once convinced, however, he enlists Dudley's support in securing the funds for the cathedral. But Dudley is distracted by an inappropriate attraction to Julia. In fact, he uses his magical powers to distract and keep the Bishop occupied so that he can woo her.

Ultimately, Dudley confesses his passion and Julia rejects him. But this is not an unhappy resolution because when the Bishop realises he may lose his wife, he rediscovers his own passion for her and declares himself ready to fight even an emissary of Heaven to save his marriage. 

The cathedral is never built. Desiring to complete his mission, Dudley visits the Bishop's benefactor and enables her to confess that she has been so concerned with building a monument to her late husband because she never loved him. Her only love was a young composer who died nearly three decades earlier. She has been haunted by his memory ever since. When the Bishop arrives he finds her utterly changed by her confession, and determined to give her fortune to people in need around the world.

As Dudley has said at another point in the film, it would have seemed a great pity to build such an enormous roof when the money could have been spent building so many smaller ones. 

A message as apparently radical, but actually entirely logical and humane, made sense only two years after a conflict that nearly destroyed the world. But in two or three years, as McCarthyism began to sweep through Hollywood like a California wildfire, such sentiments would have been unconscionable. Political fashions come and go, thankfully, and great art lives on past its creators and detractors.

To quote David Niven in the film, watching 'The Bishop's Wife' gave me 'an inexplicable feeling of happiness' all day. We all need a restoration of our faith sometimes, whether we are Christians, Buddhists, hallucinating mystics or we believe in nothing but football.

Bard at the Beeb

A week or so ago, I went down to Radio Northampton to do an interview about the old Railway Club in Wellingborough. A researcher at the station is putting together something about the history of music and youth culture in the county (I think that's the focus), and after seeing something I wrote here on Suffolk Punch, he invited me to participate.

We could have done it over the phone, or via Skype, if I'd had Skype, but I wanted to have a look inside the station. I'd been passing it every day for years, whenever I was in town, and latterly I'd known several people who'd been in there to talk about poetry, or charity. I don't like to admit it, but I'm occasionally very competitive. I want adventure; and I don't want you to have more adventure than me.

The experience was brief, but I loved it. And hated it. I went into a studio just vacated by the guy on the afternoon show and spoke into a microphone like Willie Nelson on a tour date promo. The young researcher asked me about the club, the bands who'd played there, and the attractions of the rock 'n' roll and rockabilly culture. I said that it was my first experience of anything vaguely adult, and that even the stories about the violence the club attracted were compelling reasons to be there for a naïve kid. I theorised that back then everybody wanted to belong to a gang, and mine was just a nostalgia gang with greasy hair, tight trousers and fluorescent socks. Was it the same these days, I wondered? I didn't know.

Occasionally my voice trembled. His attentive gaze made me nervous. I was afraid I was talking crap, or worse, sounding as old and irrelevant as reminiscing about these things was making me feel. It was a club that had been demolished at least a year ago. And the school I attended when I went there had been turned into a housing estate in the Nineties.

I don't want to go into the archives of history as an ex-Ted, I thought, absurdly, even as I romanticised for my interviewer. But in some way the idea that something, at least, might outlast me for a while was curiously comforting. And it sure as shit won't be my poetry. Those were good times. And the music was excellent.

After about fifteen minutes, the researcher concluded the interview. Is that it? I thought, Geldof-like. I wanted to go on for another half an hour, expanding into new areas, inspiring other programmes.

"That's great," he said. "I can use more of that than I thought."

Are you just being professional, saying that? I wondered, while feeling simultaneously flattered, like a child who'd been praised for cleaning up his toys. Public appearances of any sort open me up like a wound, letting out all of my insecurities. But I have to take him at his word. We'll see when the show airs on February 7th at midday how much of my interview made the cut.

Not that I'll be listening. I'll be out walking in the park while Michelle listens for me and prepares all the reassurances I will, and won't, believe.

The Rabbit in the Moon

The rabbit in the moon appears in Bengali folk tales as well as the Buddhist story I've written about before.

I have seen it, as anyone who listens to my inconsequential ramblings will know. But I won't tell anyone else where it is, because each person must find the rabbit in the moon by him-/herself; it's a test of spiritual perception.

When I saw it, I stood alone on Kettering Road in Northampton and laughed out loud. I must have looked at the moon 100,000 times without noticing it.

As the Buddhist saying goes, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."

That night a young East-European couple had stopped at the kerb on Churchill Avenue looking up at the sky. The man was pointing at something above their heads and the woman was laughing.

Perhaps he had just seen the rabbit in the moon as well. It must have been a night of magic.

Meet Lew Bear

Lew Bear is a folksinger (at least, that's what I'd call him) making albums and appearing live, when work allows, in and around Northamptonshire. He probably goes further afield, but in keeping with SP's usual commitment to high quality investigative journalism, I don't have that information for you. Have a look at Lew's website and I'm sure there'll be information on gigs.

Like all artists, I imagine Lew has been practising and refining his craft since he was old enough to pick up a guitar; I know I wrote my first novel, a revenge Western called 'Blood Lust', when I was 10 or 11. But the three albums he sent me, which cover 2011 to 2014, show that the process of critical self-appraisal necessary to the creation of good work in any medium, continues with Lew even though he has found the space in which he wants to work.

How is that evidenced? Not necessarily in quantum leaps of improvement, because the first album, 'Done in the Dark', is by no means a bad album; and it's certainly not as bad as Lew told me it was, before he admitted it wasn't wholly atrocious but might have been better as an ep. I like it. It lacks polish, perhaps--at times the songs sound like demos rather than finished recordings--but that's what Springsteen calls, 'not just the sound of music being played, but music being made', and it can be fascinating, like peering undetected through the window at a band rehearsal.

Elements that will feature in the two subsequent albums are already present on 'Done in the Dark', like an intelligent appreciation of the folk tradition, which is to say true folk, the old songs and stories;  tthe wonderful 'Mad Ole Girl' and 'All Roads Meet' lope along like horses loose in a field, and it's not hard to imagine Jack the Bastard getting drunk to either of them by a crackling fire after robbing a coach on the Daventry Road.

The congeniality of Lew's more mature style is present here too. His rich, round voice tells us just to enjoy life's journey on 'All Roads Meet'; and he advises us to greet the world with a friendly 'Hey Ja' on the song of the same name. This year's 'Ripples' opens with an eponymous track reminding us that if we give love we spread love; our actions are our only true heritage. He writes it better and sings it better in 'Ripples'--that song's exquisite--but the seed is there early. I can't think of anyone else who ploughs that sweet, generous, open-hearted furrow (can a furrow be open-hearted?) without sounding trite. But with Lew you can tell that the evenness of his spirit is hard won. 'Echoes of the Past' and 'No Return' on the 'Ripples' album are filled with sharp regret.

Politics shows itself in all three of the albums Lew's recorded since 2011, though you might say the version of Kipling's 'If' on 'Ripples', combined with the title song's call for love, gradually draws politics into something more existential. (What is it with Kipling by the way? That old imperialist seems really popular right now. The Scrumpy Bastards have set one of his to music as well.) 'Land of Hope and Glory' on 'Done in the Dark' is a recession-era call for collective resistance. 'My Son John', I suspect, is another version of the traditional anti-war song 'Mrs McGrath'. But don't quote me on that. Seeing Martin Carthy perform something similar was one of the high points of my gigging life.

If I could only take one of Lew Bear's three albums with me on a rocket ship out of the galaxy, I have to admit it would be the second, 'Down by the Riverside'. It's not necessarily any better than 'Ripples', but it was recorded, as the sleeve states, 'completely live, without overdubs or fx, by the rivers and in the forests and fields of Northamptonshire'. The opening track, 'Slow Lane', a hymn to unhurried, quiet living (that congenial vision again), has wild birds accompanying Lew's vocals, and rushing water for an intro and an outro. I would want that, in space, to remind me how much I loved the county I'd left behind.

Some of Lew's original compositions here appear on the first and third albums, demonstrating what I said before about how committed he is to refining his art.  And the choice of traditionals has clearly been made by an aesthete. 'Cancha Line Em Track' sounds like a very English version of an Alan Lomax field recording; and 'Wild Mountain Thyme' is restored to its original folk beauty after being transformed into a slice of psychedelic pop a few decades ago. Ken Nash has done 'In the Pines' live, or at least during his soundchecks, and everybody remembers the version by Nirvana from their MTV Unplugged. It remains one of the weirdest, greatest, most sinister songs I've ever heard. Strangely, an artist as gentle as Lew has no trouble making its strangeness convincing.

Perhaps there's something more twisted about the affable, extremely gifted Lew Bear than meets the eye.

Kenneth J Nash & Friends at the Pomfret Arms

The Kenneth J Nash & Friends concert tour, which I'm proud to be a part of, landed at the Pomfret Arms in Northampton on Sunday. Playing out in the barn at the back of the building on a windy afternoon, several musicians , one band and two poets performed to a modest but approving audience--which included my friend Martyna's daughter, who can be seen running in and out of shot on at least one of the videos filmed at the show. This tour is growing in style and confidence already, and we've only done two gigs.

I can't single out star performers because I genuinely liked them all. Star moments? Ken Nash performing 'Like A River', the chorus dreamed Coleridge-like by his mother Carol. Jay Jones' song 'White Feathers', which all of us were impressed by. Jono Bell's beautiful ukulele song for lost friends. Chris Browne's exceptional guitar playing. Curtis E. Johnson generally. Sheila Mosley's self-penned song in defence of the NHS (she said she doesn't write many, but if that's any measure of her talent she should). And Bridged, the three-piece rock band from Thrapston. I cadged a free ep from them at the end of their set; I'll write about it here when I have time.

The only poet on the bill this time, other than yours truly, was the Bard of Northampton, Nathan Jones. I invited Nathan to top the bill when I curated the spoken word stage at Woodfest this year because he's a very good performer. His poems mix light and shade in a way that's perfect for performance, and he never strains for the laughs, even though he's funny. The judges at the Picnic made a good choice when he was awarded the big blue cape of Bardage.

Next stop on the tour is the Carpenter's Arms in Irchester on Saturday night. In a month this fabulous band of travelling musicians and poets return to the Pomfret, and between there's a gig at Market Harborough. The line-up varies from time to time so even if you've seen it once, come out again and have another look. Some of the greatest talent locally will be playing for you.

Chris Browne BrowneProject

This is 'Silver Sun' by Chris Browne. He's from Rushden in Northamptonshire and usually he busks on the streets around the county (although lately he's played indoors a few times with the 'Kenneth J. Nash and Friends' travelling show).

Chris has an album out called 'Busker Rhyme', which you can get on iTunes (I think that's how you spell it). And next weekend he's auditioning for 'Britain's Got Talent'. I hope he does well. If there's any justice he should blow the competition out of the room--although he's far too nice a bloke to want to blow anybody anywhere.

Watch this for proof of what I'm saying. He's a hell of a guitar player. And he's singing this one at the audition.

SUN WILL SHINE AGAIN: DUBVOCALIZA AT SUMMER RETREAT

The highlight of the first day of this year's Summer Retreat in Northampton was a great set by Dubvocaliza, from London. Returning for another appearance after storming the festival in 2013, they took to the stage (newly situated in the woods) late in the afternoon and played for what seemed like only ten or fifteen minutes--although it was really much longer than that. When Barrington and the band are at the mic, the vibes are so good you forget time, and yourself as well.

I love Dubvocaliza, if that's not obvious already. So does everybody else who sees them (everybody I've spoken to anyway). It's those classic reggae sounds, the interplay between vocalists, and the sheer stagecraft; Barrington doesn't stand still for a moment, and between songs he talks to the crowd, offering pithy inspirational messages connected to the music. Dubvocaliza are all about positivity, keeping the faith in a world ravaged by 'pirates and vultures' (the title of one of their songs); as another one says, 'the sun will shine again'--and who doesn't need to hear that with war raging all around the globe this year?

The area around the stage rapidly filled with festival goers when Dubvocaliza started their set, and despite the drop in temperature and the lack of booze, many of the audience danced all the way through the show. Even I moved a little bit, and I am the worst, most self-conscious dancer on Earth. I couldn't help it; the reggae spirit moved me. Three hours later, back at home in poetry headquarters, I'm still wondering how it's possible to have so much entertainment without even paying an entrance fee.

This is a good band, my friends. Very, very good. Find them online or go to a show when they visit your town. You'll see I'm not wrong.

Review: Inside Llewyn Davis

“We knew about the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte and their hordes of squeaky-clean imitators, but we felt like that was a different world that had nothing to do with us. Most of those people couldn’t play worth a damn and were indifferent singers, and as far as material was concerned they were scraping the top of the barrel, singing songs that we had all learned and dropped already. It was Sing Along with Mitch and the Fireside Book of Folk Songs, performed by sophomores in paisley shirts, and it was a one hundred percent rip-off: they were ripping off the material, they were ripping off the authors, composers, collectors, and sources, and they were ripping off the public.”

“We had so much opportunity to try out our stuff in public, get clobbered, figure out what was wrong, and go back and try it again. It was brutally hard work, because these crowds of tourists usually started out at the bars and by the time they got around to us they were completely loaded. So we would be playing for audiences of fifty or a hundred drunken suburbanites who really could not have cared less about the music—they were there to see the freaks and raise some hell. In that kind of situation, you either learn how to handle yourself onstage or you go into some other line of work, and the people who stuck it out became thoroughly seasoned pros.”

Both quotes from Dave Van Ronk.


“Inside Llewyn Davis” is a melancholy minor masterpiece about a passing era, specifically the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the late 1950s-early 1960s. Loosely based on events in the life of folk legend Dave Van Ronk, it follows the eponymous hero (played by Oscar Isaac) through one turbulent week—a week in which beatings and setbacks force him to confront the reality of his life and the apparent futility of his convictions about the music he plays.

Davis sleeps on other people’s couches and lives from hand to mouth; he thinks that the ambition of his former lover Jean (played by Carey Mulligan) to make enough money from performing to move out to the suburbs is square. For Llewyn, at the beginning, there is a higher motive for his gigging. It’s the purity, the authenticity, Van Ronk refers to in the opening quote. America in the 1950s was, by all accounts I rely on, an oppressively conservative society. The few folksingers who made money did so by removing any element in their music that hinted at the rural or proletarian origins of the material. Listening to the commercial recording artists who claimed folk connections back then, you hear music so syrupy or parodic you wonder how it was ever considered to be anything more than pop.

Uninformed critics have suggested that the dullness and naivete of the music before Bob Dylan landed in the Village in 1961 is the fundamental problem of “Inside Llewyn Davis.” In a sense, so these people would have it, the movie is an elegy for something that didn’t deserve to be saved.

I’m appalled and mystified by that view. Anyone who reads my stuff will know Bob Dylan has been the most important artist of my life. But to suggest that his music is intrinsically valuable and the music of those who came before him has none makes two mistakes. One is ignoring the fact that Dylan’s music grew out of the stuff he heard around him; without the scene as it was prior to his arrival, there would have been no Bob. The second mistake is confusing the authentic folk with the commercial rubbish. Yes, the Kingston Trio look and sound ridiculous now, but I’d rather listen to the New Lost City Ramblers than almost all of the things I hear on my radio these days when I tune in to the wrong station by accident in the mornings. Their version of “Tom Dooley” is one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard.

Dylan didn’t make folk music great by mixing it with surreal poetry. He made great music by mixing surreal poetry with folk. Van Ronk, Joan Baez and Karen Dalton were better singers and musicians. He just had that extra something, including a whole heap of luck: what would have happened, after all, if Robert Shelton of the Times hadn’t turned up to see the show he was support act for on that famous New York night? Or if he’d been a year older, a year more tired, a year less hungry, when it happened and Shelton had seen just another jobbing folkie instead of an embryonic star? Would the call have come from Columbia and John Hammond then? Maybe not.

More intelligent detractors have said that if “Inside Llewyn Davis” misses something, it’s only that it doesn’t show explicitly the ideological grounding of the Greenwich Village scene. Traditional folk music was played and listened to by people on the Left before Dylan’s infamous “betrayal” of protest songs on “Another Side Of…” and “Bringing It All Back Home.” Intense political debate—often, according to Van Ronk, violent in nature—fuelled the ideas and ideals of the artists. Maybe a bit of that in the movie would have deepened the characterisations of Llewyn and those whose paths he crosses; and shown to those who didn’t get it that the world of the movie is a serious one, not just a laughably quaint moment of long-ago history which our hero trudges through being offensive to everyone and hitting on all comers for favours.

This is a work of fiction, though, not a documentary, and a Coen Brothers movie at that. Character is the focus and it’s through Llewyn that the truths of the piece are revealed. The sharp contrast between his working class trade union background and the comfort of his middle class admirers should tell us something about politics; and with the exception of one speech in the Café Reggio, when Llewyn outlines his ideas to Jean, integrity is barely discussed—instead, it’s marvellously symbolised in a ginger cat which Llewyn loses and then pursues around New York. If only the screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave” had seen this before creating the careless exposition of the Brad Pitt scene in that movie.

“Inside Llewyn Davis” has sent me not to my Dylan albums today, but back to the work of all the artists who were eclipsed by the brilliant light of his fame. I’ve had a wonderful time revisiting Van Ronk, the aforementioned Karen Dalton, Mark Spoelstra, Mimi and Richard Farina. Dylan’s success was artistic as well as material, but it made fame and money the goal rather than the love of the great tradition; and there’s a sadness to that, for me. It buried something that we needed to keep alive in this world, or risk abandoning everyone to the slowly spreading, culturally homogenising capitalist nightmare.

Yes, that’s right. The one we’re in now. Would Van Ronk, even if he’d been producing great work still, as Dylan is, have advertised cars at the Superbowl? I don’t think so somehow. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” in that respect, remembers an age when we were not yet smart enough to stop resisting.

What You Gonna Do When The Mail Runs Dry?

It’s World Book Day, and in answer to the question World Book Day naturally provokes, I’m reading the diaries of English actor Kenneth Williams. I’m also reading the journals of Betsy Sheridan and Soren Kierkegaard and the letters of William S. Burroughs. I move between them, usually using their proximity to the place I’m sitting as my criterion for selection.

I love reading the private documents and ephemera of public figures. I know that some insist creative work should be read and understood without reference to its creator; but something that excites my intellect or my imagination always provokes an extra curiosity in me. When I read “A Season in Hell” by Arthur Rimbaud the fabulousness of it made me want to know more about the person responsible for bringing it into the world. Not that Rimbaud was an easy man to locate.

Which has me wondering, today, how the arrival of the technological age will affect our future study of the arts. My poet friends and I used to send each other letters; I have an archive of handwritten or typed and hand-signed communication from many people who are gone now. Anybody who wanted to build a picture of Dave Church, Joe Speer and Norbert Blei, among others—a picture that is distinct from the surviving published work—can access my archive, and those accumulated by my friends, and the men behind the poetry and the prose live and breathe again.

These days, however, poets and writers send emails and use social media like everybody else. Do they print them for posterity? I used to, but the cost became prohibitive. So my exchanges with other artists are either preserved for however long Facebook survives, or they disappear immediately into the void. I keep a handwritten journal as well as a public blog . . . do others? Or am I just carrying on the furtive behaviour of the socially inadequate teenager I once was?

Educators (as opposed to tutors) will know more about where the study of literature is heading; and I’m sure postmodernists would have something to say about technology and the Self that would be completely brilliant and apropos, although I’m equally sure I wouldn’t understand it. I have never had much of a head for theory. I like to read the lives of my authors and historical personalities the way I read their works, and by putting man or woman and work together, attempt a deeper understanding of both. If anybody wants to do that in 50 years they will have a much harder time than I’ve had, thanks to email and Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg. Will the public interview become our portal to the private from now on? and how much is that going to hide?

GUEST POST: Fear and Loathing at the Royal Mail (by Bartholomew Bundy)

2013 ended for me not in the blaze of literary awards shows and gala dinners, but in the hard slog of casual Christmas work for the Royal Mail. This is how it is for poets and artists in the underground, unless they get lucky, and no one complains about it. You start out believing it will give your work an edge, but then you realise that’s romantic drivel. Manual labour is as soul-destroying and spirit-flattening as any other kind of labour; usually after a day digging gardens or sorting in a warehouse all you want to do is get drunk, not write poetry. But while it’s no better than any other kind of work, for the poet, it’s no worse either, and even John Cooper Clarke spends half his life on tour. Unless you’re rich or dead you have to do something.

The Royal Mail job seemed like it would be okay. I needed the money, and we would only be doing 8 hours a day 5 days a week. But I wasn’t prepared for what I found at the freezing cold, leaky warehouse the Royal Mail had rented temporarily for the Christmas season. Some of it still echoes unpleasantly in my mind three months later.

At the warehouse most of the things being sorted and dispatched were parcels from Amazon and Kuehne-Nagel, and the workforce doing the sorting across early, late and night shifts were either all the Royal Mail’s own casual workers or people recruited from agencies. There were also two “workplace coaches” on hand to instruct workers in safe practice and give whatever other advice and support (work-related, in theory) that we needed. One flirted shamelessly with the younger females and took the piss out of a female line manager at every available opportunity; both slagged off their colleagues at the main sorting office across town and said that the union gave everyone there the excuse to work poorly and be obstructive.

Hatred for the union among the permanent Royal Mail staff at the warehouse was pathological. My line manager, who rightly or wrongly was described to me as a “man-eater,” kept stopping me in my work. When it wasn’t to show me texts from her son or a picture taken by a casual who had left the country, but whose number she had stored in her phone, it was to describe the petty, self-indulgent, immature behaviour of unionised workers who had “been there too long and thought the world owed them a living.” “Where else,” she said, “can you get paid what they do for an unskilled job?”

This line manager was ridiculed by everybody who worked in her section for her constant shouting. She would stop for fifteen minutes in an aisle to look at her phone or talk about everything except work to a casual, and then shout at someone else, usually a younger person, for taking a minute out to catch up with someone in a different section. I heard the same names over and over and over again. Most of the time, when something more than a name was being shouted, I couldn’t understand what she said because of the way her voice echoed around the high walls and roof of the warehouse. But when her nightly frenzy climaxed I could hear, “Sort don’t talk!” and “Work faster!” At one point she simply bellowed “WORK!” elongating the word in a way that’s impossible to describe.

Maybe this is common practice now, but I found it stupid, disrespectful and counter-productive. It’s bad enough that people should only be paid minimum wage to exhaust themselves daily; shouldn’t the compensation they receive for that be a recognition of their right to be treated in a dignified fashion? Or have we reached the point, in our hurtling journey back to the Victorian Era, where employees are expected to be grateful that they have any work at all?

One of the managers spoke to me towards the end of my contract about the things that had been achieved in the two months. Number one out of all the PSCs (parcel sorting centres) in the country since it opened (or nearly). He said “We wouldn’t have had that success if we followed the working model used in other places. This is the model we intend to move to. But that’s for the future.”

The model? Workers with no rights. More than one casual in my time there was fired on the spot because they were found, during one of the daily, and allegedly random, security checks, to have a mobile phone on the operational floor. Only the managers were allowed to carry phones, just as they were the only ones allowed to bring in water. You’d think it reasonably obvious that a manager might be able to steal, or arrange a theft via a mobile, as easily as a casual; but one of the managers explained the distinction to me while I was being checked: “Instances of theft among casuals are very high.” (Even if this is true, might a living wage rather than a subsistence wage go some way to solving the problem?)

Other people disappeared too, one after having two days off to look after her poorly child. If you’re a casual worker, of course, your manager can do that; he or she can flick you out of the building like balled-up KitKat paper from a desk. The most infamous of the departures was a guy who, when asked to come for a security check, told the manager to fuck off. After he was escorted from the building my line manager, who at the time I still thought—mistakenly—that I could talk to like an equal, came over to tell me about it. We agreed that he probably had something on him he didn’t want anybody to find. “But people do get upset about their human rights,” I said. “Maybe it was that.”

“It’s not an infringement of his human rights to be asked to turn out his pockets,” she bristled. “It’s in his contract.”

The Royal Mail hires now through an agency called Angard. At the end of the Christmas period every year the managers put forward names of suitable employees to Angard, who then, supposedly at their own discretion, take on those they like to fill in sickness and annual leave shifts at the mail centres. After long stints of working as an agency employee within the Royal Mail, you are then considered for permanent status. As our contract came to an end getting on the list was the talk of the workforce; nearly all of us, obviously, needed the money even if the work was boring us senseless. “It’s going to be a very small list,” one of the managers said to me, on the same day he talked about the model of work used at the PSC. He then went on to eulogise about the performance of one casual who’d stayed until four in the morning to help clear a backlog.

Which is fine; but not everybody can do that. And not just because they are old-fashioned, unhelpful jobsworths. The guy who did that was 25 years younger than me and 35 years younger than some of the others. People have families also. Is a labourer only worthy of his hire if, for minimum wage, he exists only to work?

I should have known then that my chances of getting on their exalted list and being put forward to work for Angard were fucked. I had done no overtime at all, primarily because I was scared that getting overly tired would affect my epilepsy. But my line manager had told me I would be on the list and I thought she was telling me the truth.

Then I really ruined it. On the last day the manager walked from person to person with feedback sheets. We were told to fill them in –“Be as honest as you like”—and sign them. While he waited to make sure that every person had completed one. Who ever heard of a feedback sheet that you sign your name to? Naively, I now realise, I wrote, “My only gripe is that we were not allowed to have water with us while we worked.” I could have written a hundred other things, but I was trying to be reasonable. The manager looked at it expressionlessly—he would make a good chess player—and slipped it into his pile of completed sheets.

A guy who had done nothing but bitch when we were in the canteen passed by. The manager stopped him and told him to fill out a form. He asked what he should write in the comments at the bottom. “Anything you want,” came the answer. “Be as honest as you like.” The guy shrugged insouciantly. “I have no complaints,” he said. “Everything is wonderful!” “Write that then,” said the manager, looking much more pleased with him than he was with me.

After the manager had moved on to tell the next victim to be as honest as they liked, I challenged the guy: “How could you say everything was wonderful? All you’ve done is slag everything off since you started here!” “Do you think those twats are gonna offer me any work after Christmas if I criticise them and put my name to it?” he asked. “Grow up.”

His words stung because I knew he was right, and the prediction turned out to be true. Several of the casuals I worked alongside at the PSC were invited by Angard to go to the mail centre in January; and despite my line manager’s promise that I was on the list, and her boss’ public declaration in the main entrance one day that I was doing a fine job on my station, I haven’t heard a word from Angard or the Royal Mail in three months. The price you pay in this country, it seems, for thinking you have a right to speak freely when you’re on the bottom of the economic ladder (a rung poets share with warehouse workers, cleaners and—bizarrely—care assistants) is social exclusion and penury.

And now the vacancies Angard advertise list, under requirements, “receptivity to change.” That’s that new model of work creeping slowly over the hill, the one that employees themselves will be forced to assist the managers in creating, by sheer economic necessity. It will be something like a strong cat putting itself to sleep, but what can you do? Food must be put on the table. It’s hard to take the longer view when your landlord is banging on the door for rent.

Virginia Cherrill

Virginia Cherrill with Charlie Chaplin in "City Lights"

There are two scenes in all the movies I've ever watched that I would run into a burning house to save if the last copy were inside. One is the final moment of Eric Rohmer's "Le Rayon Vert," where Marie Riviere sits on the cliffside with a new love as the sun goes down over the sea. The other is the scene in "City Lights" where Virginia Cherrill's flower girl, her sight restored, sees Charlie Chaplin's tramp for the first time. Both moments are so beautiful and so moving I cry every time they're on.

A week or so ago Michelle and I were in Kettering, touring the charity shops as we do in search of rare books, movies and things for the flat; and we heard a violin playing mournfully. Someone nearby was busking in the rain. "God, that music so reminds me of 'City Lights'," I said, and began talking, probably for the hundredth time, about the scene with the flower girl.

"Le Rayon Vert" has an underlying theme about personal signs and symbols; how one needs to read them to live life freely. Two minutes after we'd heard the violin player we went into another charity shop and Michelle found "Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill" by Miranda Seymour (2009). How strange is that? I wasn't sure whether it would be my sort of book, but because of my love for that movie I bought it.

I'm happy to report that it's wonderful. It's not academic by any means, nor is it particularly incisive, and sometimes it's poorly written, or edited ( two paragraphs begin "confirmation of this..." on consecutive pages); but Virginia Cherrill's life in the ten years that the book broadly covers is so amazing the reader can't wait to find out what happens next.

Every film enthusiast has seen "City Lights" and knows about "the flower girl." Who knew that she married and divorced Cary Grant, had a non-committal affair with David Niven? (Consequently she loved watching "The Bishop's Wife" in later years.) Who knew that the same woman, bored by movies, went to England? was courted by a maharajah? rejected him because of the misogyny of Indian traditions and their brutality towards animals? Who knew she married a lord, and became "Mother" during WWII to a squadron of Polish fighter pilots?

Like every good biographer Seymour is a little bit in love with her subject. When you read the book you can't help liking Virginia Cherrill quite a bit yourself. It takes style to find fame and fortune in the palm of your hand and throw them both away. But Cherrill had a life of such adventure afterwards, and found riches again so quickly, it would be surprising if she missed Hollywood at all.