WHEN THE STORM IS COMING: WHAT EPILEPSY IS LIKE ON THE INSIDE

I was walking down Kettering Road to get my medication from Parklands Pharmacy this afternoon when I started feeling ill. It began as an awareness, a creeping awareness, that something wasn't right inside. I didn't know what, but it had happened before, sometimes with bad results.

I began to panic, at least vaguely. Then I had a queasy feeling somewhere between my stomach and my chest. When I looked at the steady flow of passing cars I realised my brain was giving unusual attention to the number plates. I wrenched it away, knowing when I do this a seizure is coming. I consciously shut off the noisy music playing in my head too. When the storm is coming, you have to try to be absolutely still and quiet inside, however afraid you are.

While all this was going on -- this silent, invisible struggle -- I walked. But I had to slow down. I thought I might vomit if I didn't. I debated with myself whether to keep going to the chemist, or turn around and go home, where I would be safer. I looked ahead of me, scouting for somewhere I could go and crouch if a collapse was imminent. I spotted an overgrown, bushy fence with a wide grass verge in front of it. 'There,' I thought. I could see myself clearly, on my back having a seizure in the frosty grass, cars still streaming by, though I knew someone, at least, would stop.

It was just as far home now as it was to the chemist. So I continued walking, defiantly, maybe stupidly, still afraid even though my symptoms were subsiding.

Nothing happened this time. Well, let's say it didn't get any worse. Feeling scared and lonely as I did -- the loneliness is indescribable when you know you might collapse in public -- that's enough of a thing for one day. But next time, or the one after that, it could be a seizure, and every time I have a seizure I could die. My hope is that people will understand these things when they wonder why I'm not the same man anymore.

Northampton Keeps Its Best Venues...For Now.

found image, artist unknown

I was delighted to hear the other day that two important venues in Northampton have been thrown a lifeline in their struggle to survive the economic hardship of the pandemic. Roadmender and the Lab will both receive grants from the government's Cultural Recovery Fund. Natalie Norris of Roadmender is quoted in the local paper the Chron as saying that the money will help them keep the doors open for another six months. I presume it will have a similarly beneficial effect on the immediate future of the Lab. 

I have a small history with both places. I saw Hawkwind play at Roadmender on a spectacular double bill with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. I also saw a band called Nik Turner's Space Ritual. Nik Turner used to play with Hawkwind, so you can see what kind of musical head I had on in those pre-epilepsy days. I can't go to most indoor gigs anymore because flashing lights give me seizures. (Epilepsy warnings at live shows, anyone?) Another band I saw at Roadmender was Polyphonic Spree. Or I think it was there. It may have been in Birmingham. As Bob Dylan would say, 'A lot of water under the bridge / A lot of other things too.'

Everybody in Northampton knows Roadmender even if they haven't been there. It's a big white-walled building that sits prominently on the corner of Lady's Lane. You see it from the road when you're heading up to Kingsthorpe, towards Semilong or when you're coming in the other direction travelling towards the bus station or the rail station. The Lab, on Charles Street, is probably less well-known but in terms of the cultural life of Northampton, I think it's more important.

I went to a poetry and music night at the Lab when it was still called the Labour Club. Raising The Awen was organised by the folks who brought us the annual Bardic Picnic; its purpose was to encourage poets and spoken word artists to share their work in an uncritical, non-competitive environment. Musicians came along too. It wasn't for me in the end because I have too much angst about reading in public, even in a supportive arena like the Labour Club was; I'm a wallflower. But the nights were good ones and the club has continued to support poetry and the singers and bands in the Northampton area ever since. I believe I'm right in saying it's largely volunteer-run as well.

A town that's suffering like Northampton, with businesses going to the wall and Covid deaths multiplying again, needs its culture. And the longer the mess we're in continues, the deeper the need for that culture will go. It's good that venues like the Lab and Roadmender will survive for a few months more so that the musicians and the poets might one day have somewhere to play again.

'Years of Poetical Prosing': John Clare and the Shoe Town Tradition

At least two great poets are associated with the county I live in, Northamptonshire. One is John Dryden, who grew up in Titchmarsh and has his figure carved into the wall of the Northampton Public Library on Abington Street. Dryden wrote the brilliantly nasty poem MacFlecknoe which was the first poem I remember really enjoying; we studied it in A Level English at Tresham College in Kettering.

The second poet is John Clare, whose reputation has waxed as Dryden's has waned. He is known as The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, although because of administrative changes the village of his birth, Helpston, previously inside the county boundary, now falls under the City of Peterborough Unitary Authority. Clare spent 23 years - the last years of his life - at the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, now St. Andrew's. Dr. Fenwick Skrimshore, who admitted Clare, attributed his illness to 'years of poetical prosing.' God help us all.

Clare is now celebrated as one of the great sons of Northampton. His statue sits - curiously - in the Guildhall courtyard where very few people see it except council officers on their lunchbreaks. But there is also a plaque directing tourists to All Saints Church, where Restoration King Charles II stands on the portico like a slightly effete Roman Emperor, gazing down Gold Street towards Wilko and the Salvation Army shop. Clare liked to sit outside All Saints, or so Tourist Information tell us. I have sat outside the church myself quite often trying to think myself into his world, his time, wondering exactly where he sat, this small, probably very intense, rumpled man. Even the effort of that makes you feel a sort of kinship with him.

In this generation Northampton has many poets. My personal favourite is Jimtom James, whose performs his poetry - pandemics notwithstanding - with a small band accompanying him. Jimtom's poems work equally well as spoken word pieces, and on the page, which isn't always the case with poetry. I won't attempt to describe them. I don't have the critical vocabulary, and that's not surprising: his poetical voice seems entirely original to me. How can you describe something that you've never encountered before, other than in the broadest terms? His poems are like spells. But not really. His poems are manifestos. But they're not at all. His poems are prayers. Yes, some. But not like in church. Jimtom's poems remind me best of Keats' metaphor of a pool of water (or is it a lake?). When you dive in, you don't try to understand the water, you swim.

A few years ago now, he and I went to spend some time with other John Clare enthusiasts at Clare's statue. I think it was for National Poetry Day. My wife Michelle came too. Everybody was invited to celebrate Clare by reading their favourite poem of his. Jimtom did; I didn't. I was too shy, even though the number of people there was small. But I was glad I'd attended. It occurred to me as I sat and watched that in different ways Jimtom and I were inheritors of the tradition begun by Clare, if not by the much less sympathetic and appealing Dryden. He had passed a torch to us and we were still doing the work, Jimtom most powerfully with his concern for the preservation of the natural world and our host planet.

Whether of us would have been able to bear Clare as a companion for too long, especially once he started talking about politics, is another matter entirely. Clare, by all accounts, was conservative in his outlook, although I suspect those labels might have had different shades of meaning at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

'I am as far as my politics reaches 'King and Country' – no Innovations in Religion and Government say I.' (John Clare)

The Trial of the Chicago Seven (Well, Eight)

Aaron Sorkin's new Netflix movie 'The Trial of the Chicago 7' arrives on our screens in October. In the present climate, it's going to be a timely piece. The film is set in 1968, when the Vietnam War and institutionalised racism were dividing America much as it is divided today. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago that year, the police famously ran riot and viciously assaulted hundreds of young people who had come to the city to protest against the war. Although the motivation of those who came was more various and complex than that. Poet Ed Sanders saw the assembly of youth in the streets and parks of Chicago as a 'Festival of Life' that would act as a kind of karmic counterweight, in its affirmative message, to the hawkish warmongering inside what he called the 'Democratic Death Convention'.

Britannica suggests that the reason for the brutal attack by the police on the young people who'd come to the city was the attempted enforcement of an 11pm curfew, which the protestors refused to comply with. The city, run by the notorious Mayor Daley, denied the groups in attendance permits to all marches and rallies except an afternoon rally in Grant Park. Unsurprisingly, given that they had nowhere else to go, about 15,000 people turned up, but when they tried to march out of the park they were intercepted by police in a manner so violent Sandi Thompson revealed that it made her husband Hunter weep. He was in Chicago for the Convention. I've always believed his seething hatred of Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, which flowered magnificently in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, took root during that campaign.

Julius Hoffman

Hundreds of people were arrested during the police riots that lasted, in total, five days and nights, among them eight significant political activists and counter-culture leaders. And in the trial that followed, which is the subject of the film, Judge Julius Hoffman and the Prosecution did everything they could to have the defendants jailed.  Everything legal and everything that pushed the law to breaking point. I've known about the trial for years because I am a fan of Allen Ginsberg, who testified for the Defence (though his testimony is not shown in the film). And yet the last time I saw the 1987 play Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8, it still shocked and angered me, even though I knew what was coming.

Bobby Seale

The film is titled differently from the play because Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was severed from the case by Hoffman and sentenced to four years for contempt of court. Eight, therefore, had become seven. Why? Denied the right both to be defended by the lawyer of his choice or to defend himself, Seale was understandably furious:

[…] Those jive lying witnesses up there presented by these pig agents of the government […] lie and say and condone some rotten racists, fascist crap by racist cops […] I demand my constitutional rights!

Seale's reward for those comments, initially, was to be bound and gagged and made to sit in the courtroom as proceedings continued. This lasted for several days before Seale was finally removed. Even watching a group of actors play out this moment is profoundly distressing. To think that it happened in real life, in our time (mine anyway), boggles the mind. I don't know if the history of the Black Panthers is taught in American schools; I'm pretty sure it isn't in the UK. But in the era of Black Lives Matter, after the murder of George Floyd and the outrageous exoneration of the cops involved in the death of Breonna Taylor - at a time when cities in the US are burning with the need for racial justice - the spectacle of a black man being humiliated deliberately by a judge who the current president would invite to dinner might possibly prove incendiary. 

The Silent Women of 'Don't Look Back'

Sally Grossman with Bob Dylan

There's a poetry documentary shot sometime in the Sixties in which Robert Creeley talks while his then-wife Bobbie listens and throws in occasional observations of her own. But interjections are all she gets to make. She has a place at the table, but her role is to be there as witness to her husband's speech, his insights, to be (I can't help thinking) in her rapt attentive state a sort of boast that reinforces his importance. Creeley, we learned when Bobbie found her own voice, was open about his expectation of the woman he lived with. He did not want to compete with another writer. But conscious or unconscious misogyny were a habit of the times.

bobbielouisehawkins.com 

This afternoon I watched the D.A. Pennebaker masterpiece Don't Look Back for the first time in years and I saw something in it that I'd never seen before: the silence of the women. Several women appear in the film; some make interjections like Bobbie Hawkins and the others say nothing at all. The only exception is Joan Baez, who's extremely vocal, sings songs (mostly Dylan's) and follows Bob from town to town hoping (we learn when we read a little deeper) that he will invite her onto the stage as she had invited him when his star was in the ascendant in America. He doesn't reciprocate. Another woman silenced, at least publicly, although Joan didn't really need Dylan's help. Her reputation as one of folk music's greatest artists is undiminished 55 years after the movie was shot.

Joan Baez

Don't Look Back is about Bob Dylan, of course, and the frantic nature of his growing fame. It's not about Joan Baez, although Pennebaker does seem interested in her as a subject; and Allen Ginsberg has only a minimal role - although he features in the outstanding sequence for Subterranean Homesick Blues that opens the film, and was already infamous enough to need no introduction. But the presence of Sally Grossman seems almost decorative, and Marianne Faithfull sits so quietly in Dylan's noisy hotel room you would hardly know she's there (the grainy black & white film Pennebaker uses makes her harder to see, I have to admit). It's Alan Price who talks and sings, and Donovan who Bob seems almost threatened by until he meets him. Many Dylan fans feel he deliberately owns Donovan by singing It's All Over Now, Baby Blue after the latter's To Sing For You when they are trading songs at the hotel. Bob's is undoubtedly the better song, but Donovan asks him to sing it, and Dylan looks pleased by the request.

Who is the woman who sings with Alan Price backstage at one of the shows and gamely tries to be heard over the chorus of loud male voices? This may be common knowledge among bigger Dylan fans than me (although I have admired him for nearly forty years), and among devotees of Alan Price; but I've been searching on the internet for two days and I can't even find her picture. Nor can I find any information about Jones Alk, other than that she was the first wife of Howard Alk, the bearded, bespectacled, bear-like figure in the movie who seems ready to throw people out of the hotel room for Bob when a beer bottle is dropped out of the window.

Howard was a filmmaker and Jones is clearly recording sound throughout the film. So you might not expect her to speak anyway. But in a long sequence toward the end of the film, when Dylan confronts an admirably restrained reporter from Time magazine, Pennebaker makes the curious decision to shoot the interview from such an angle that only Dylan and Jones can be seen, notwithstanding cutaways to the reporter; other people, the men in Dylan's entourage, can be heard, joining in with Bob's impertinent attack on the reporter in what looks to me like an act of collective bullying (I know many would find that an absurd statement), but they have had their exposure earlier in the movie. Jones is in full view for 6 minutes and says nothing at all; she smokes and listens with rapt attention, as if what she's hearing is provoking the deepest thoughts. Her presence at the table is so similar to Bobbie Louise Hawkins' in its nature and symbolism it can't be a coincidence.

The difference is that Jones doesn't speak at all. I can't be the only one who wants to know if she agreed with Dylan that Time would be improved by collages or that he was onto something when he said each word had its little letter and big letter. I'd like to think that she was really writing a poem in her head as I sometimes do when someone else is talking too much; but I suppose we'll never find out.

Rare and Collectable: Rexroth & Ferlinghetti 'Poetry Readings in the Cellar'

This was recorded in 1957 in the Cellar on Green Street, San Francisco, and released on the Fantasy label. The Cellar, apparently, was a downstairs nightclub that in a previous incarnation was a Chinese restaurant. The album features Kenneth Rexroth, the reluctant and sometimes unacknowledged progenitor of the West Coast bohemian scene, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the legendary poet and City Lights bookstore owner, whose most celebrated cultural achievement, perhaps, was publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl in his Pocket Poets series. Ferlinghetti almost went to jail for that bold visionary act, but thanks to a landmark decision by Judge Clayton Horn, what resulted from the Howl obscenity trial was a liberalisation of poetic expression in the Western world, enormous publicity for Ferlinghetti's store and publishing house and global fame for Ginsberg.

Here, Rexroth and Ferlinghetti read poems and the Cellar Jazz Quintet accompany them, improvising impressively. (To me Rexroth's voice is weirdly like Tom Hanks when he's in deep character.) On the original vinyl lp at least - I haven't heard the cd reissue - the sound is wonderful. I don't have the critical vocabulary to explain why it's so good, being neither a critic nor a musician, but I love the way it transports me, when I hear it, back to the time when High Fidelity was the most advanced technology they had. I could almost look out of my window and see businessmen in macs and fedoras coming home from work in the dark. Sound on cd tends to be so clean and pure all the atmosphere is distilled from it. 

ruth weiss, who waitressed at the Cellar but also mesmerised audiences with her readings there, famously said, 'Ferlinghetti and Rexroth were poets who read over jazz; but jazz was part of me; I swung.' That's true, but it doesn't matter. Both wrote great, intelligent poetry - Rexroth sometimes overtly, angrily political; Ferlinghetti hipper, funny, subtly political - and some of it is represented on this record. They're not jazz poets, they're poets of words and ideas vocalised over microphones, but the Quintet are sensitive accompanists who weave their jazz around and through the orations so they're given greater emphasis and emotional context. Which is to say that you might understand what they say a little easier and give them more attention because of the jazz, and if you're encountering Rexroth for the first time you might need the help.

Highlights for me are Rexroth's 20 minute reading of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill (In Memory of Dylan Thomas)', which at certain points rises to such magnificent rhetorical levels it has echoes of the Moloch section of Howl; I also really like Ferlinghetti's Autobiography. But Ferlinghetti has an impish charm that makes everything he does appealing, even if he sometimes seems a little too cute and doesn't quite get to the meat of the matter. You'd certainly rather spend a night out with him than intense, grumpy old Kenneth, snarling anarchist slogans through his well-groomed moustache. 

'Ratched' is an Entertaining Let-Down

Ratched arrived on Netflix the other day. It's based on one of American literature's most memorable creations, Head Nurse Mildred Ratched from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Everybody who read that book, or saw the movie of the same name, was chilled by Ratched's cold, brutal domination of the ward at the acute mental hospital in which. the protagonist, and Ratched's antagonist, R.P. McMurphy arrives after doing time at a prison farm for statutory rape. (How times have changed. Imagine trying to sell that as a heroic backstory now.) He isn't mentally ill; he wants to avoid hard labour for the rest of his sentence - which by any reckoning is profoundly sensible. The question of how mental illness is defined and how it should be treated is of key importance to Kesey's novel and the film.

This new show is, in one respect, a prequel to Kesey's novel because it presents us with the early life of Mildred Ratched. It shows her, in the pilot we watched last night, getting her first job in a mental hospital. She is already displaying the cruelty and menace of her later incarnation and we learn why. The show's star Sarah Paulson even bears some resemblance to Louise Fletcher's Ratched from the movie. But that's where the similarities between original and prequel end.

Ratched is described as a 'psychological thriller drama' or a 'psychological horror drama'. It's genre, and Paulson's Ratched is a grotesque, drawn so large her wickedness is less shocking than it is comedic. This is the sort of tv you watch to laugh at each new grizzly murder or incredibly rude comeback. Kesey's Ratched - and Fletcher's Ratched - was frightening because her evil (if such a thing exists) was coldly banal. I worked with more than one person who Kesey might have modelled his Head Nurse on in my 15 years as a care worker. They were appalling, cruel people, completely lacking in empathy, and they went home every day to partner and children and led utterly normal lives, popular in their communities and untroubled by conscience.

I intend to watch the rest of the series, though. It may be derivative and occasionally predictable; it may be yet another show that depicts the mentally ill as physically ravaged, stooping, body-slashing maniacs (some are, most aren't); but it's also great fun, something colourful and stylish to sit down with for an hour before you go to bed. If you want something deeper you can go back to the movie or the book. Then you'll really learn about the true nature of madness, and the improper exercise of power.

 

The Second Wave is Here

Boris Johnson announced yesterday what had been apparent to most of us for some time: the second wave of this coronavirus has arrived. Now, according to the news, the government are considering a second, short, nationwide lockdown to arrest its exponential growth. Whether that will happen or not I don't know. (Obviously.) My guess is that nationwide readjustments will come into effect to the measures that were announced when lockdown was eased. Another ban on visits to other households; perhaps a ban on meetings in parks, although as the colder weather comes in that will be less of a problem anyway. We might see a curfew placed an pubs and restaurants, which they already have in parts of the North. What's certain is that something has to be done, and as Angela Rayner, the Labour Party's deputy leader has said today, all of us should get behind the actions taken if they are indicated by the science. I would add that if the science indicates a complete lockdown, then that's what must be done, regardless of the economic consequences (although if it didn't work last time...). Perhaps I can afford to say this because I'm broke anyway and have nothing to lose except my life and the lives of the people I love. But two people in my partner's family have had Covid-19; others have had scares but were ultimately okay. It's like a small earthquake in your world when you hear somebody close to you has been struck down.

My fear is that the government's scientific advisors are too close to Johnson, Cummings and whoever else makes the political decisions at present to give a truly effective, impartial view of the state of the pandemic and the best strategies to tackle it. That could be my cynicism, of course - as a lifelong doubter of institutions - but having watched most of the broadcasts from Downing Street during the first lockdown, when Professor Whitty stood beside whichever half-bright minister Johnson sent in his place and looked far too meek and humbled for a clever man, I doubt somehow that the scientists have as much influence over government as they should.

Casablanca and Its Warning

Last night's movie at Bard Towers was Casablanca. If you're not familiar with the movie - and younger readers and movie watchers might not be - Humphrey Bogart plays the cynical Rick Blaine, who runs a bar in the unoccupied French territory of Morocco in the early part of WWII. Ingrid Bergman plays Ilsa Lund, the wife of Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Czech resistance leader who has escaped from a German concentration camp and is seeking passage to America to continue his work against the Nazis. Rick can get him to America because he holds letters of transit given to him by Ugarte, a petty crook, played by Peter Lorre. But the letters were obtained by the murder of two German soldiers, which makes possession of them dangerous, and anyway, Rick doesn't want to get involved. Politics is not for him, he says; he's just a poor bar owner.

And at the beginning of the movie he's serious. This is a wartime film, however, released in 1942, so you wouldn't expect America's most famous flinty, pistol-wielding hero to stand by for too long as the Nazis press their jackboot down on a city run by a French authority that's apparently too weak to assert itself. Rick once loved Ilsa and she broke his heart; that's why he won't help anybody but himself. When he learns that she broke his heart to save him from the Germans as Paris fell, however, Rick begins to see daylight again, and decides to help her and husband. 'I'm no good at being noble,' he tells Ilsa,  'but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.'

That's just one example of some of the richest dialogue you'll ever find in movies. Julius & Philip Epstein and Howard Koch's screenplay, based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, gave the world, 'We'll always have Paris,'  and a line I wish I'd written, 'Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.' Beat that. 'Here's looking at you, kid,' one of the film's most legendary quotes, was allegedly ad-libbed by Bogart. I really want that to be true.

Fans of Casablanca will notice that I've missed one quote. It's the last line of the movie. Rick and Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), who's the leader of the French authorities in the city, are standing at the airport in a worryingly thick but no doubt metaphorical fog, having just seen Laszlo and Ilsa off in a plane. Rick has killed Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), the German officer who has come to arrest him, expecting no resistance from Renault, who throughout the film has protested his complete lack of scruples. Renault, however, is tired of collaboration, and instructs his own officers to 'round up the usual suspects.' As Rick and Renault walk away together, the latter outlines his plan for Rick's escape. 'Louis,' Rick says, 'I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'

I don't know why, but that seems incredibly poignant watching 78 years later, in our present hothouse political climate. It's regrettable enough that so much of England sees Europe as its enemy now, although the EU itself may have contributed to that alienation with its one-size-fits-all politics. But when an American president is a fascist in everything but name, and has more in common with extremist bullies and dictators than he does with the leaders of France and Germany, you can see how far we've come since the days of the beautiful, pragmatic, peace-delivering international friendships that began in the ferment of World War II.

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

'It's my role in the universe to make people feel better,' Elsa Dorfman says in this lovely, gentle, touching documentary, currently streaming on Netflix. Elsa passed away this year on May 30th, leaving a body of work behind unique in its success as well as its lack of pretension. Elsa frequently stood her subjects in front of a white screen and photographed them without props. When she did, however, something magical would happen. Elsa claimed she was only interested in surfaces, but somehow, by capturing what appeared on the surface of her subject, the essence was revealed.

We learn in the film that her camera was one of only six in the world. Maybe that had something to do with the magic of her portraits. It was a Polaroid 20 x 24 inch camera (quite a beast). When Polaroid went bankrupt in 2008, production of the film the camera used ceased. Elsa bought a final year's supply and that was it. Her whole modus operandi had become a relic of the past.

I first became aware of Elsa through her pictures of Allen Ginsberg. The two of them were great friends. Elsa had worked at Grove Press in the 1950s and taken photos of other poet luminaries like Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. The Ginsberg photos have endured, though, possibly because he has endured (to some extent) in the popular consciousness where the other poets haven't. Bob Dylan has certainly endured and Elsa's most famous photograph is of Dylan and Ginsberg together, backstage at the Rolling Thunder tour. In it, Dylan appears to be teaching Ginsberg how to play guitar. It's a brilliant, seductive picture, assumed by almost everybody to have been spontaneously captured.

Except Ginsberg writes in his journal the night before that such a picture would make a wonderful image. Elsa says herself in the movie that he always had one eye on posterity. He would never even send a letter without going down to Grove Press to get it photocopied first, she remembers.

Diana Rigg

One thing this blog missed recently is the death of Diana Rigg. It happened sometime last week. We were waiting for her debut appearance in the new tv adaptation of 'All Creatures Great and Small' when we heard. Sadly her first scene as Mrs. Pumphrey came a few days after her passing and the show ended with an image of the actress and her birth and death dates. It was quiet and moving.

I didn't see Diana in 'Game of Thrones' because like her, I didn't watch the show. But her career had blossomed again wonderfully in her seventies, when she began appearing as a succession of formidable grandmothers, some of them eccentric, and in the case of Mrs. Pumphrey, enjoying the freedom age brings to flirt shamelessly without responsibility. She had spoken of her advancing years as a release in a magazine interview.

She was great in those late roles. But of course it's 'The Avengers' for which most of us will remember her. 'The Avengers' is the essence of 1960s style, its cool, its unselfconscious silliness - if you're the best-looking, best-dressed person in the room, if you're the person who, as Dylan would say, knows what's happening, you don't have to take yourself seriously.

They never did. In a show I saw recently, Steed and Emma are out shooting to relax after an adventure in a castle. Emma raises her shotgun to the sky and shoots down a succession of teddy bears, one of which has a bottle of champagne beside it. The next volley of shots brings down two champagne glasses.

If you have to ask why, or if you feel the need to ask why, perhaps, 'The Avengers' just isn't for you.

POEM: 'In Amongst My Diminishing Stock of Days'

'In Amongst My Diminishing Stock of Days'

In amongst my diminishing stock of days,

the only good ones are the ones with you:

at home, or walking round a town somewhere,

searching for bookshops and for Roman ruins.

I'm too old now to try to seem to be

what I never was, like when the bosses loved me.

(Bruce Hodder 2020)

POEM: A VEGAN MANIFESTO

No animal

ever gives itself

to the hunter’s knife

or shotgun

voluntarily.

That’s horse shit;

and no less

because

a brown-skinned

elder said it.

If you crave

life’s continuation,

the deer, the cow

and the badger do.

Every creature

that walks the Earth

or rides its thermals

wants to live.

They must, then.

Let us share their home.

There’s room

and sustenance enough

to forget the bullet,

to lay down the blade,

to forego the slaughter

of the trawler net.

The BATTLE OF THE BEANFIELD

In those days wearing beards 

was an arrestable offence.

Hair was gelled back rigid,

and the only value recognized 

as worth your time was money.

It was a cookie cutter age.

Even music was all synthesised 

to squeeze the human out.

That’s why they beat the shit 

out of the hippies at the Solstice.

We’d wanted a free festival 

at Stonehenge on the longest day.

We drove buses there from anywhere

that life had left the land.

Thirteen hundred cops attacked 

six hundred rainbow travellers,

smashing up our heads and buses,

throwing pregnant women on the ground,

and terrifying kids.

One threw a fire extinguisher at me.

Thank fuck his arm was weak.

A reporter for the tv news 

declared it police brutality.

It was a clear move by the government 

against the counterculture,

whose love of drugs and bright clothes,

whose preposterously wild hair,

might offer an alternative 

to the pile of gold they sat on  

that they'd stolen from the poor.

But you know what? Margaret Thatcher’s dead.

And most of her government are dead.

And the chief of police in Wiltshire, dead.

I want to know his secret 

if he’s not, the vicious bastard.

They’re gone. But I’m still standing here.

My beard is even longer than it was then, 

and my heart’s unchanged.

I’m freerer than the Wiltshire wind

that blows around those ancient stones.

It’s just my bones that slow me up these days

especially when it’s cold!

written using things people told me and stuff I read

THIS IS MY TRUTH, TELL MY YOURS

SUFFOLK PUNCH is 14 years old this year. I'm sure there are blogs that have been going even longer, but there can't be many. As a form the blog seemed to go out of fashion when Facebook really started gaining traction, other than those that were linked to a specific institution like a university or a business. And how well read they are is anybody's guess, although I came across one from Keele University recently that was exceptional. Business blogs are almost always unreadably bland, presenting a picture of its activities and achievements so sunny and positive no one believes them.

Blogs by individuals probably aren't immediate or interactive enough for the modern audience. Unless my hits counter tells the story of one singularly unpopular blogger. My readership is considerably smaller than it used to be, and my profile as a poet and an editor is much higher. But still I write SP doggedly, stubborn as an old tree stump, determined not to give up. I write a private journal too. I've been doing that since 1987, long before I'd ever heard of the internet. Putting ideas down in (hopefully) well-constructed sentences for anybody who might be interested - that's just what I do. And the content of my blog, although it isn't as revealing as my private journal, must be honest and true to my vision of the world as a poet and an activist (of sorts), or the whole reason for writing vanishes. 

The title of an old album by somebody or other said it best: this is my truth, tell me yours. SUFFOLK PUNCH is, was and always will be the place where, whether anybody else was interested or not, I shared what I was thinking at the time. But not as edicts laid down on tablets of stone; just as statements of opinion or histories of my experiences. When the poems aren't coming, in particular, it's a useful outlet. And even when they are, I don't always want to be hitting social media vainly linking to my published works. I did that when my poetry book came out and nobody bought it anyway.

I'd much rather have a conversation. Show you a little of who I am and see what you come back with. 'Candor ends paranoia' as Allen Ginsberg says. And if the world can be persuaded to drop its guard and talk, we might have a future. It's not working at the moment, with the blog, but I've been at it too long -- i'm in too deep -- to give up on this old horse now.

A VIEW FROM THE 66%

Yesterday we learned from the ONS that 66% of people with epilepsy in this country are unemployed. Since the majority of us with the condition can work, and the JobCentre insists that we must work, and since there is legislation which at least officially forbids disability discrimination, what is the explanation for this? Why are so many people living with epilepsy not also working with epilepsy?

It can only be discrimination that somehow goes under the radar. The discreet binning of applicant files. The 'more suitable candidate' at the interview stage. (Sometimes a candidate without epilepsy will be more suitable of course, but are we to believe that only 34% of people living with epilepsy are worth hiring? A candidate without a significant health condition has considerable advantages at job interviews anyway. Some companies recognise this; many don't.)

The terms and conditions of certain jobs also discriminate against epileptics. The policy warehouses like James & James have of dismissing staff if they are absent three times in one month, for example. It would be harsh on any employee to fire them for sickness, but I might have three days off in January, unavoidably, because of my seizures, and then none until the following April. Having a generic termination policy that makes no allowance for different health conditions is illegal. But no one ever challenges it because they are afraid of losing their job.

The kinder commentators see yesterday's statistics as a reflection of a lack of understanding about epilepsy among employers. If this is all it is -- I'm not convinced -- let me, as someone living with the condition, explain a little about it from the inside out, as it were. My account will be incomplete because everybody's experience of illness is different. But perhaps I can help a few employers, the ones who still consider their staff something other than an endlessly renewable supply of Morlocks; if they're out there, perhaps I can help them to realise that epilepsy is not something to fear, or something which renders a person useless. It's just a health condition, and a non-contagious one, and the person who has it might be the man or woman your company has been waiting for.

THE CONDITION, FROM THE INSIDE

Seizures

I have tonic-clonic seizures. They are the bad ones. The really bad ones. I have warnings before them that last long enough, usually, for me to take off my glasses and sit or lie down somewhere safe. I do this to avoid hurting myself by falling from a standing position.

After the seizure I remember nothing. Sometimes witnesses have described me getting up and behaving in a confused manner. When I do this I should not be disturbed, unless I am endangering my safety. The memory of this confused behaviour, and the pre-seizure warning, return slowly over the day.

All my muscles ache after the seizure. My head pounds too. I also experience a tremendous sense of depression and the desire to be alone. This is the reason why I want to go to sleep. I'm not still ill; I'm not in need of medical attention. I just need time to restore my body and my mind.

Warnings

I have warnings without seizures too, although the symptoms are sometimes identical and every time it happens I think I am about to go to the ground. My warnings tend to take the form of visual and auditory hallucinations: the sudden magnification of tiny details like a blink, or voices suddenly echoing as if a living room had become a great hall.

I experience these warnings all over the place and at any time, although I am more likely to have them when I'm too cold, when I'm over-tired or when I'm excessively anxious. Long work at a computer screen brings them on too.

While a warning is taking place my breath may seem to become heavy and I may not answer you. This is because I am scared. I'm trying to focus in on myself, to control and then regulate my breath, thereby calming my mind.

Each warning leaves me with a headache and a feeling of nausea for at least an hour afterwards.

I sometimes have warnings in clusters. After months without, I can suddenly have eight in two days. Given how poorly that makes me feel, and how frightened, work is sometimes out of the question.

The Psychological Impact

This is probably the least understood aspect of life with epilepsy -- and with any other condition, for that matter. The JobCentre and the various contractors they work with tell you that you mustn't be negative. Positive thoughts create positive outcomes etc etc. The desk jockeys sharing these supposedly inspiring philosophies are nearly always able-bodied and if they have any of the invisible conditions, they never share them with you. Which they would. I know someone who, when attempting a discussion with a JobCentre coach about her severe arthritis, was reminded that she, the coach, worked 40 hours a week with cluster migraines.

As someone living with epilepsy, I face the daily reality that every time I step out of my front door I may collapse in the street, on the bus or in my workplace. I might even die if the seizure is a little worse than usual. I live with a fear of that unknown next hour or six hours or twenty-four hours that never goes away -- it is unsettling on an existential level -- and still, after 15 years, I have a sense of guilt because I am not as healthy as I used to be.

Consequently I have withdrawn from many social situations because I no longer feel safe in them. Where I feel safe is in my home, surrounded by familiar objects and soft places for me to fall. But I withdrew from people too, a few years ago, some who might even have had some feeling for me, and when I did that I fell into a depression that lasted seven or eight months. 

But I kept my job throughout that long and dark period. I never missed a day through sickness. In fact, an epileptic learns to perform wellness, almost unconsciously, as a way of reassuring people about his or her acceptability, their normality, so most probably didn't even know I was sick. 


CLOSING

A few years ago, a tremendous service was done to dementia care and research by the popularising of the dementia champions concept. Advocacy was encouraged and awareness raised; even MPs were declaring themselves champions at one point, although their zeal was predictably short-lived.

Epilepsy needs its champions too. There needs, perhaps, to be a co-ordinated national campaign led by figures with high public profiles to put epilepsy centre stage for once -- it has a marginal to non-existent media presence -- and educate people, employers and potential work colleagues included, about what it really involves.

It's either that or leave us squeezed forever between a JobCentre that doesn't want to give us benefits and a working world that doesn't want to give us a chance. Or maybe the lives of people with disabilities don't matter anymore, notwithstanding the bullyingly motivational speeches given to us by employment experts with loads of training under their belts, but no idea what it's really like in the hot seat.

Sorry, but I think it's that.