I met the last woman I was seriously involved with when I was at work. "Shitting in your own nest," they call that, because it makes an unholy mess in a place where you really need to have some kind of comfort and security. Though I would do it again, if the right woman came along (at the right price ha ha).
I was working for social services when I met her, in a residential home in Kettering that's since been closed, and they had a policy against relationships between colleagues. So when we got together my new partner said we ought to keep what was happening between us a secret. I suspected even then that the policy against relationships wasn't the only reason she wanted to pretend we were still just friends, but it was a great cover story, if nothing else. (She was married, for one, and didn't want to become the subject of a lot of workplace gossip, especially given the fact that her new partner was me--regarded with some accuracy as a bit of a weirdo by half of my colleagues.)
So we didn't tell anybody what we were doing. And then of course everybody figured it out because our behaviour had changed towards each other and we'd been seen out together; and our persistance in the lie made us look like snooty fools who had no respect for their colleagues. By the time I left the place, as I had to when the secret finally came out, even the few good relationships I had there had been ruined by the subterfuge; and now I don't know where any of my lost friends are. I think about them sometimes now and wish I could go back and put right the mistakes I made.Find those people and say sorry; pick up where we left off as friends. But you can't do that, of course, ninety nine per cent of the time. Things are lost and you have to chalk it up to experience, try not to make the same mistake next time.
What galls me a little is that I lost them and her eventually, and had to start my life all over again, with nothing except a roof over my head and a job to keep it there. (Which is more than some people have, I know, but it didn't feel like a lot at the time.) I don't blame my ex-partner for any of it: the friends, or the final demise of our relationship--it turned out the way it had to, given the way it started, and who I am, and who she is, and how incompatible we really were from the start. We were just two people who had reached a moment in our lives when we needed something to happen, and it did.
Sometimes when I survey the damage it caused us all, however, I do wonder if it wouldn't have been better to forego that last drink and not have the first amazing kiss that caused the Kettering scene to fall down around my ears.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Know Your Rights (1)
On the radio last night, I heard this reassuring little gem:
"It's not illegal to kill yourself in this country."
The police must have been relieved to hear that. Can you imagine them blue-lighting over to the mortuaries to arrest the day's new batch of dead?
"It's not illegal to kill yourself in this country."
The police must have been relieved to hear that. Can you imagine them blue-lighting over to the mortuaries to arrest the day's new batch of dead?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Me And That Old Suburban Marching Powder
A friend of mine said, last night, "I don't know anyone who hasn't done a bit of coke." Well, you do, mate, because I haven't. I've always been a pot and lager man, no more. Oh, and peanut butter, of course. That's beginning to make me look like Biggles would have looked if you'd taken him out of a W.E. Johns novel and plonked him down in the middle of San Franciso in 1967.
I've known a lot of snorters, of course. You can hardly fail to given coke's ubiquity. I've known people who were heroin users too, though amusingly, in the drug user's hierarchy, that's looked down on. "You don't see any dirty old tramps doing coke," my friend said yesterday. "It's definitely the drug of professionals."
There was only one time when I was tempted to try anything stronger than Miss Green. It was when I was going out with my friend's friend Ronnie, who I'd worked with in a care home in Kettering. She was interesting, a pagan, she'd previously had a wild mane of dreadlocks but had been off work for a long time and had returned with her hair all shorn, and dyed. We'd been planning to meet up with her mates at a New Year's Eve party in Northampton and she'd said there'd be a lot of pills about.
I didn't want to take them, but I didn't want to look too straight to Ronnie either, not in the first tentative weeks of our relationship. It would take her a little longer to figure out where my radicalism lay than it had taken me to find hers.
A moment of weakness emotionally and intellectually I kicked myself for briefly. I'd let my personality be swallowed by the women I'd hung around with before instead of just declaring confidently who I was and letting the consequences take care of themselves. It seemed, on reflection, that I'd taken that rather sorry trait as far as I could go if I was contemplating doing speed or something just to make Ronnie like me.
But I didn't take the pills. My relationship with Ronnie didn't last long enough for my resolve to be tested. Though it wouldn't necessarily have been a big defining moment either way, if I had taken them. I probably would have had a really nice time and great sex if I had, let's be honest (the booze I favour, old traditionalist, certainly does nothing for performance in the bedroom).
I felt funny, talking to my friend and this bloke we know, last night, given their immersion in the drug scene and my peripherally peripheral knowledge of it. Funny because I don't like to be bested on anything at all--I only want to go abroad again so I can say I've been--but also because I have this ridiculous, suburban, bourgeois urge to prove I'm more counter-culture than everybody else.
But is coke counter-culture if it's also "the drug of professionals"? The people who talk about doing it certainly like to think of themselves as being separate from the common herd (as I do, unless I'm on a socialist jag that week). But can counter-culture be counter-culture if everybody's doing it?
The best thing a kid can be armed with these days if he or she wants to cut out a life for themselves that hasn't been chosen for them by cynical businessmen and fuckwit politicians is a BOOK. Or preferably a few books. Something on world history. Something on the religions. Something on literature, music, poetry, and painting. A kid armed with knowledge and a clear head is the biggest danger to the forces of oppression here or anywhere else in the world.
(Of course, buoyed by the superhuman confidence of cocaine they might be even more formidable...)(I'm joking, I'm joking.)
I've known a lot of snorters, of course. You can hardly fail to given coke's ubiquity. I've known people who were heroin users too, though amusingly, in the drug user's hierarchy, that's looked down on. "You don't see any dirty old tramps doing coke," my friend said yesterday. "It's definitely the drug of professionals."
There was only one time when I was tempted to try anything stronger than Miss Green. It was when I was going out with my friend's friend Ronnie, who I'd worked with in a care home in Kettering. She was interesting, a pagan, she'd previously had a wild mane of dreadlocks but had been off work for a long time and had returned with her hair all shorn, and dyed. We'd been planning to meet up with her mates at a New Year's Eve party in Northampton and she'd said there'd be a lot of pills about.
I didn't want to take them, but I didn't want to look too straight to Ronnie either, not in the first tentative weeks of our relationship. It would take her a little longer to figure out where my radicalism lay than it had taken me to find hers.
A moment of weakness emotionally and intellectually I kicked myself for briefly. I'd let my personality be swallowed by the women I'd hung around with before instead of just declaring confidently who I was and letting the consequences take care of themselves. It seemed, on reflection, that I'd taken that rather sorry trait as far as I could go if I was contemplating doing speed or something just to make Ronnie like me.
But I didn't take the pills. My relationship with Ronnie didn't last long enough for my resolve to be tested. Though it wouldn't necessarily have been a big defining moment either way, if I had taken them. I probably would have had a really nice time and great sex if I had, let's be honest (the booze I favour, old traditionalist, certainly does nothing for performance in the bedroom).
I felt funny, talking to my friend and this bloke we know, last night, given their immersion in the drug scene and my peripherally peripheral knowledge of it. Funny because I don't like to be bested on anything at all--I only want to go abroad again so I can say I've been--but also because I have this ridiculous, suburban, bourgeois urge to prove I'm more counter-culture than everybody else.
But is coke counter-culture if it's also "the drug of professionals"? The people who talk about doing it certainly like to think of themselves as being separate from the common herd (as I do, unless I'm on a socialist jag that week). But can counter-culture be counter-culture if everybody's doing it?
The best thing a kid can be armed with these days if he or she wants to cut out a life for themselves that hasn't been chosen for them by cynical businessmen and fuckwit politicians is a BOOK. Or preferably a few books. Something on world history. Something on the religions. Something on literature, music, poetry, and painting. A kid armed with knowledge and a clear head is the biggest danger to the forces of oppression here or anywhere else in the world.
(Of course, buoyed by the superhuman confidence of cocaine they might be even more formidable...)(I'm joking, I'm joking.)
Everything Must Go, And Went
I listened to the Manic Street Preachers' cd "Everything Must Go" this morning for the first time in about ten years. What happened to them, I wonder? A truly great band, perhaps the greatest of the late Nineties, and certainly my own favourite back then. How we need their intelligence, their commitment to something other than their own haircuts, now.
It's a ridiculously obvious observation that music opens the door to old feelings. But I will make it anyway. When the cd was playing, it was as as if '96 or '97 had blown in through the open window and set up again in my living room. And that wasn't an especially comfortable sensation.
Richey Edwards disappeared around the time my mother got cancer. "Everything Must Go", their immense, valedictory, first post-Richey album, came out either just before or just after my mother died (the chronology is jumbled, maybe not surprisingly, in my mind). And the songs provided the soundtrack to the stunned, immobilised year or two that followed her death, as well as the beginning of the slide of my housemate (who I've spoken of before), into a madness that nearly destroyed us both. (You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not.)
It wasn't a time I remember with much easy nostalgia. So I may not be playing the Manic's cd all that often, as magnificent as it is. Doing so would be extremely masochistic and self-indulgent, like cutting yourself to see what colour your blood is.
It's red, fool. Vivid red, and let free it runs like an angry river.
It's a ridiculously obvious observation that music opens the door to old feelings. But I will make it anyway. When the cd was playing, it was as as if '96 or '97 had blown in through the open window and set up again in my living room. And that wasn't an especially comfortable sensation.
Richey Edwards disappeared around the time my mother got cancer. "Everything Must Go", their immense, valedictory, first post-Richey album, came out either just before or just after my mother died (the chronology is jumbled, maybe not surprisingly, in my mind). And the songs provided the soundtrack to the stunned, immobilised year or two that followed her death, as well as the beginning of the slide of my housemate (who I've spoken of before), into a madness that nearly destroyed us both. (You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not.)
It wasn't a time I remember with much easy nostalgia. So I may not be playing the Manic's cd all that often, as magnificent as it is. Doing so would be extremely masochistic and self-indulgent, like cutting yourself to see what colour your blood is.
It's red, fool. Vivid red, and let free it runs like an angry river.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
A Flipping Van
I saw a stolen van turn over in a ditch this lunchtime. It took a corner too quickly as it left the A45 near Billing Aquadrome, veered violently off course, flipped over on its roof then landed with the right side up again in a ditch, as everyone on my bus--which was travelling behind it--let out a collective gasp and stood up in their seats to get a better view of the crash. As soon as the van stopped rolling, two men climbed out of the open window on the passenger side--the door was jammed--and ran away up the road towards Earls Barton. At first we thought they were just getting clear of the van in case it blew up like they always used to in American tv shows. But they kept on running, and soon they'd disappeared altogether. Hence my not-altogether-brilliant surmise that the van was stolen.
The bus driver called 999 on his mobile to inform the police and he couldn't get through. "Is it actually 10-10-10 and I'm calling the wrong number?" he asked sarcastically from his cab. A few of the passengers laughed cynically: I don't know, what is England coming to? But most were still looking towards the van, speculating as to whether a third person was trapped inside the cab. Either that or they were comparing their own accident experiences with each other. There was a woman doing that in the seat behind me: an African woman with the most melifluous, sensual voice I've ever heard. Listening to her was like rolling naked on silk sheets in a really warm bedroom while the woman of your dreams rubs cocoa butter all over you. Or something . I wanted her to go on talking about her flipped car and the multiple injuries she'd sustained all afternoon.
Eventually other people passed, and stopped, and got out of their vehicles to wander around looking at the crashed van, so the bus driver, in the absence of any police cars turning up, decided to leave the scene.
An unusual little interlude for a Saturday afternoon, I think you'll agree.
The bus driver called 999 on his mobile to inform the police and he couldn't get through. "Is it actually 10-10-10 and I'm calling the wrong number?" he asked sarcastically from his cab. A few of the passengers laughed cynically: I don't know, what is England coming to? But most were still looking towards the van, speculating as to whether a third person was trapped inside the cab. Either that or they were comparing their own accident experiences with each other. There was a woman doing that in the seat behind me: an African woman with the most melifluous, sensual voice I've ever heard. Listening to her was like rolling naked on silk sheets in a really warm bedroom while the woman of your dreams rubs cocoa butter all over you. Or something . I wanted her to go on talking about her flipped car and the multiple injuries she'd sustained all afternoon.
Eventually other people passed, and stopped, and got out of their vehicles to wander around looking at the crashed van, so the bus driver, in the absence of any police cars turning up, decided to leave the scene.
An unusual little interlude for a Saturday afternoon, I think you'll agree.
A General Silence In The Room
The Guardian today reminds us that my nomination for greatest living Briton Michael Foot, now 95 years old, called for "much closer direct control over bank lending" in Labour's 1983 election manifesto. This manifesto is historically referred to as "the longest suicide note in history" and led to a defeat that almost wiped Labour off the political map.
Will all those who voted against Labour in the '83 election stand up, please?
"Capitalism doesn't work successfully forever," Foot said yesterday, probably smiling just a little--although as a man of conscience and a responsible citizen of the world the present situation must be grieving him.
Will all those who voted against Labour in the '83 election stand up, please?
"Capitalism doesn't work successfully forever," Foot said yesterday, probably smiling just a little--although as a man of conscience and a responsible citizen of the world the present situation must be grieving him.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Memories of the Doors and Selina
I spoke to this teenage girl the other day. Very cute and intelligent she was (in that order in my leery sexist reckoning), but in the course of our conversation it emerged that she didn't know who Jim Morrison or the Doors were.
It may seem obvious that somebody who's 16 won't necessarily have come across a band that split up nearly forty years ago. But I was really surprised by it. I don't listen to them much anymore--and I rarely read Jimbo's poetry--but the Doors were one of the defining cultural experiences of my youth. I couldn't quite compute the idea that a band and a writer who helped me become who I am (for what that's worth) might have passed another person by completely. If they were that insignificant to a really cool person, what did it mean for all my assumptions about the validity and importance of my own cultural journey?
After speaking to the girl I went home and fished out my copies of "Morrison Hotel" and "An American Prayer" and played them through several times, while drinking cold beer through my beard like an ageing Jim.
Suddenly I remembered watching the Oliver Stone movie, massively twisted on booze and marijuana in the darkness of a cinema that's no longer there in Wellingborough. I'd seen the movie once by myself, but this time I was with a girlfriend, Selina, a hippie psychotherapist who believed she was immortal because people only chose to die. And I was so hammered I couldn't follow the movie at all. It was just a phantasmagoria of noise and colour like the light shows they used to project behind the Grateful Dead in the first great days of the psychedelic explosion in San Francisco.
I got stoned quite a lot when I was with Selina. So stoned, actually, that the sex between us was terrible. "Jesus, what does it take with you?" I remember her saying in exasperation under the covers in her house in Irthlingborough one night as she furiously jerked off my flaccid member.
The best sex I ever had with Selina, in fact, was the time I masturbated on her toilet using a polaroid of her topless for inspiration. She wasn't even there that day. I'd only come around to water her plants and put out food for her two cats Morgan and Fay.
Jesus, those were the days, eh? Booze, weed, an immortal girlfriend and the Doors. If it gets much better than that, tell me where.
It may seem obvious that somebody who's 16 won't necessarily have come across a band that split up nearly forty years ago. But I was really surprised by it. I don't listen to them much anymore--and I rarely read Jimbo's poetry--but the Doors were one of the defining cultural experiences of my youth. I couldn't quite compute the idea that a band and a writer who helped me become who I am (for what that's worth) might have passed another person by completely. If they were that insignificant to a really cool person, what did it mean for all my assumptions about the validity and importance of my own cultural journey?
After speaking to the girl I went home and fished out my copies of "Morrison Hotel" and "An American Prayer" and played them through several times, while drinking cold beer through my beard like an ageing Jim.
Suddenly I remembered watching the Oliver Stone movie, massively twisted on booze and marijuana in the darkness of a cinema that's no longer there in Wellingborough. I'd seen the movie once by myself, but this time I was with a girlfriend, Selina, a hippie psychotherapist who believed she was immortal because people only chose to die. And I was so hammered I couldn't follow the movie at all. It was just a phantasmagoria of noise and colour like the light shows they used to project behind the Grateful Dead in the first great days of the psychedelic explosion in San Francisco.
I got stoned quite a lot when I was with Selina. So stoned, actually, that the sex between us was terrible. "Jesus, what does it take with you?" I remember her saying in exasperation under the covers in her house in Irthlingborough one night as she furiously jerked off my flaccid member.
The best sex I ever had with Selina, in fact, was the time I masturbated on her toilet using a polaroid of her topless for inspiration. She wasn't even there that day. I'd only come around to water her plants and put out food for her two cats Morgan and Fay.
Jesus, those were the days, eh? Booze, weed, an immortal girlfriend and the Doors. If it gets much better than that, tell me where.
Monday, October 06, 2008
A Hurricane In The Head
People who know me will be aware that I get bad depression from time to time. When it hits it hits hard, like a hurricane in the head, and for days everything goes haywire. I can't stay awake, I can't think straight, I get paranoid, I hurt the people around me either by neglecting their feelings or behaving irrationally (as they see it) towards them.
It's been going on for many years now, and I don't think I'll ever beat it. I've tried counselling. I've tried drugs. But when it's hurricane season, it doesn't matter what I think I've put up to defend the homestead. Soon it's all flying around in the air again.
It's been flying around just lately, actually. I hope now that the hurricane has started to blow itself out, but you can never be sure.
Somebody asked me today--knowing I've had, or given myself, a rough time in the past few weeks--what it was I was depressed about. I can't even begin to explain that without dragging SUFFOLK PUNCH into an area I don't want it to inhabit. I'm not even sure which comes first, the depression, or the subjects the depressed mind ruminates on.
All I know is that when it goes again I'm bruised, tired and very, very relieved.
It's been going on for many years now, and I don't think I'll ever beat it. I've tried counselling. I've tried drugs. But when it's hurricane season, it doesn't matter what I think I've put up to defend the homestead. Soon it's all flying around in the air again.
It's been flying around just lately, actually. I hope now that the hurricane has started to blow itself out, but you can never be sure.
Somebody asked me today--knowing I've had, or given myself, a rough time in the past few weeks--what it was I was depressed about. I can't even begin to explain that without dragging SUFFOLK PUNCH into an area I don't want it to inhabit. I'm not even sure which comes first, the depression, or the subjects the depressed mind ruminates on.
All I know is that when it goes again I'm bruised, tired and very, very relieved.
Obama The Bomber? Come On!
I heard some American blogger on the radio this morning trying to convince listeners that Barack Obama, by taint of association with people he denounced a long time ago, was a supporter of terrorism and murder. Well,of course he is, right? Not only is he black, he's also half Muslim. Or something. Which fits the Republican prototype of the mad bomber perfectly.
I hope everybody realises how desperate this means the Republican Party must be and dismisses the putrid insinuations out of hand. It's a new low even for them, and no party in the civilised world (wherever that is) has shown itself able to go quite as low as the Republicans.
As if we didn't know they were struggling when they chose first John McCain, and then his running mate Sarah Palin, to chase Obama and Biden for the White House.
You betcha. Gosh darn! Well, gee, folks. Oh, and did I throw in a golly?
The university educated operatives of the Republican Party will piss themselves laughing if "joe six-pack" and his "hockey mom" wife believe even half of the simple-minded bullshit they're foisting on them in an effort to protect their money and power for another four years.
I hope everybody realises how desperate this means the Republican Party must be and dismisses the putrid insinuations out of hand. It's a new low even for them, and no party in the civilised world (wherever that is) has shown itself able to go quite as low as the Republicans.
As if we didn't know they were struggling when they chose first John McCain, and then his running mate Sarah Palin, to chase Obama and Biden for the White House.
You betcha. Gosh darn! Well, gee, folks. Oh, and did I throw in a golly?
The university educated operatives of the Republican Party will piss themselves laughing if "joe six-pack" and his "hockey mom" wife believe even half of the simple-minded bullshit they're foisting on them in an effort to protect their money and power for another four years.
The Credit Crunch: Who Exactly Is To Blame?
It seems a touch hypocritical to me, all these people (those who know it's happening) blaming the supposed forthcoming economic catastrophe on the greed and rapaciousness of Wall Street and the City alone.
Anybody who voted for Thatcher or Reagan (or Blair or George Bush) was voting for an unrestrained free market. Anyone who fails to vote votes by default for the established order, and the unrestrained free market has been our established order for a whole generation.
It was the politicians who created the conditions in which the practices we're told led to the credit crunch were allowed to flourish. Wall Street and the City couldn't have done it without being set free to do it.
I voted for Tony Blair in '97 and 2000, or 2001 (whenever it was). That was to replace a rotten government with a slightly less rotten one. But I voted for the market. (I also voted for an illegal invasion of another country, and I have to live with that too.)
The only consolation I can take is knowing I have been a critic of materialism and capitalism specifically since I really understood the meaning of those words. Not that that will do me any good if the predictions are even half way accurate and the whole temple of Mammon we've all been living in since Thatcher and Reagan were elected comes crashing down around our ears.
Anybody who voted for Thatcher or Reagan (or Blair or George Bush) was voting for an unrestrained free market. Anyone who fails to vote votes by default for the established order, and the unrestrained free market has been our established order for a whole generation.
It was the politicians who created the conditions in which the practices we're told led to the credit crunch were allowed to flourish. Wall Street and the City couldn't have done it without being set free to do it.
I voted for Tony Blair in '97 and 2000, or 2001 (whenever it was). That was to replace a rotten government with a slightly less rotten one. But I voted for the market. (I also voted for an illegal invasion of another country, and I have to live with that too.)
The only consolation I can take is knowing I have been a critic of materialism and capitalism specifically since I really understood the meaning of those words. Not that that will do me any good if the predictions are even half way accurate and the whole temple of Mammon we've all been living in since Thatcher and Reagan were elected comes crashing down around our ears.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
To Whom It May Concern In Real Unreality
i am a beatnik a dharma bum a hippie an old bohemian a poet a punk a dropout a psychotic i like to drink beer i like the occasional joint i like meditation i'm learning to play the flute i think the best place a person can be is deep in the woods on a sunny day i like rain i like a full moon in the sky first thing in the morning i like my long hair i like my beard i think hair wax on men is a sign of evil i will never wear a tie again i do not want to spend twenty pounds on a shirt or a hundred quid on a pair of shoes when there are people on the streets with nowhere to sleep tonight i am not a part of your make money and buy useless shit to prove how impressive you are take a foreign holiday eat dinner in a fancy restaurant once a month world okay? okay? now hopefully i won't have to say it again.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
SEASICK STEVE
I spent most of last night in sweet isolation drinking beer, washing my clothes in the sink and hanging them to dry over my bath, and listening to the new Seasick Steve album "I STARTED OUT WITH NOTHING AND I STILL GOT MOST OF IT LEFT" (well, the title's something like that). I also reassembled my shower to Seasick Steve, as one of the doors had fallen off and I don't like stripwashing anymore since everybody in the world became obsessed with a person's smell and my 43-year-old balls dropped half way to my knees (you wait, it'll happen).
If your life is half as Beat, half as make-do-and-mend, as mine is--if you couldn't get your act together even with a million pound cheque in your bank--listen to this man's growling electrified twenty-first century blues. I swear he's the brother that my mum and dad were too ashamed to tell me about all those years ago, before my karma grew me sideways and made me seasick too.
If your life is half as Beat, half as make-do-and-mend, as mine is--if you couldn't get your act together even with a million pound cheque in your bank--listen to this man's growling electrified twenty-first century blues. I swear he's the brother that my mum and dad were too ashamed to tell me about all those years ago, before my karma grew me sideways and made me seasick too.
An Encounter On The Street
A shining example of the intelligence and articulacy of the nation's youth shouted "YOU F***IN LONG-'AIRED BASTARD" at me as I was walking down to the internet cafe a few minutes ago.
Long-'aired I obviously am.
F***ing, I would like to be.
Bastard, thankfully, I am not.
I hope that clears up any misconceptions you might have had, you delightful young man.
Of course, the likelihood of you reading this is small. The likelihood of you reading anything is small, other than the big words on your cigarette packet. But one doesn't wish to stereotype.
Long-'aired I obviously am.
F***ing, I would like to be.
Bastard, thankfully, I am not.
I hope that clears up any misconceptions you might have had, you delightful young man.
Of course, the likelihood of you reading this is small. The likelihood of you reading anything is small, other than the big words on your cigarette packet. But one doesn't wish to stereotype.
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