George Harrison: Living in the Material World

I watched the Martin Scorsese documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World last night. The wondrousness of George's best songs is not something you ever forget, but it's nice to revisit them, especially on a guided tour hosted by a great director. The movie lacks a little of the cohesion of Scorsese's Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, which was structured around Dylan's conversion to electricity and the "Judas!" heckle at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, but it's still a marvellous trip for anybody who remembers those times, has a feel for those times or who's interested in general ideas of counter-culture, and new/old alternatives to Capitalism. If you can afford the £10.99 most shops are charging for it, maybe you should give it a whirl.

Literary Leprosy and Clasping Assholes

I had Ron Whitehead on video performing "I Will Not Bow Down" with Southside this morning. It provided me with a much-needed, mind-cleansing dose of abnormality. Reminded me I was an artist … Ron has the ability to live and to work as an artist on no one’s terms but his own, whereas sometimes I see myself as I think others see me and internalise their prejudices about what I do, what I say, how I look. It’s a bad old habit which I acquired many, many years ago. A lot of Ron’s stuff speaks with absolute defiance about who he is and what he believes, like a blues song with an education, or Walt Whitman drunk on red wine jamming with a rock and roll band. It inspires me tremendously, and I probably embarrassed the hell out of him when I told him so.

I write well enough when the wind is fair and my dander’s up, but most of the time it comes out in uncontrolled spurts like the gyzm of Onan, and it ends up in all the wrong places. I should make an effort to get some of that stuff down in a poem or a proper prose piece instead of creaming all over the ephemeral medium of Facebook.

Although on Facebook a few people do read what I write from time to time. I can’t convince the poets and the publishers to touch my writing with a bargepole. I have literary leprosy, pretty much, as a poet/ writer/ blogger. As editor of BEATNIK I can at least get people to talk to me through the kitchen window of the Hallowed House of Letters, but I don’t think I’m the one who’s being served by that relationship, other than when I encounter (as I do from time to time) the work of fabulous poets previously unknown to me like Peter Marra and Eric Chaet. Everybody benefits then.

What’s the problem with the Bard of Semilong then, beside his probable reputation as a loudmouth, a bore and a Communist? (I will accept the first two, but anybody who believes number three is an idiot.) I don’t send a lot of work out because I want to be certain it’s good before it goes. But BEATNIK makes sure I have a level of visibility on the scene. And as I’ve already said, I write well enough, occasionally. I’m a terrible self-publicist though, and a pitiful networker … I have no interest in persuading anybody to go here or go there, or buy this or buy that, to read a poem by me that is no better or worse than a poem by some other bloke, and won’t keep anybody out of hell or get them into heaven.

I don’t have the time, the energy or the inclination to make friends with the editors of ten new magazines a month so they’ll publish my poetry either. I’ve got all the friends my semi-sociopathic mind can handle and I have an extremely hard time being false these days, having abandoned it as a career when I left care work. If they do publish me I’ll only wind up getting a submission from them to BEATNIK, which will probably be yawningly average, and I’ll probably be too spineless to reject it … I just don’t want to get into that. There’s too much of it goes on already in what I sometimes laughingly call the "alternative" poetry scene ("clasping assholes" was Bukowski’s phrase for the practice), and most of the poetry it produces would bore the rust off an old wire fence.

Envy! I hear you cry. Because no one loves you. Because you can’t get a book. But I’m not denying either of those charges. I’m not even denying that many of the poets out there write better poetry than I do, although an equally large number aren’t fit to carry my man bag. If you, however, are denying that there’s a game in poetry and that with a few notable exceptions the people who have the most success are the ones who know how to play it, then you’re either being disingenuous or pig-headed.

Poetry, like politics, is "the art of controlling your environment"; and I suppose I’m just not very good at control. Perhaps naively, though, I do believe that real quality will be discovered whether the game has been played, the ladder climbed and the asses clasped or not; and that (probable) fantasy is what keeps me working. It’s what inspires me to read more and to try to write better on these long nights in front of the laptop with no sound in the house except the humming of the boiler, and the rhythm of the line I’m writing making its music (on the good nights) in my brain.

Like Kerouac said about something else entirely Come back and tell me in a hundred years. Although if the governments and armies and weapons traders and economic experts of the world have their way, we’ll all have gone to hell in an overcrowded handbasket by then and none of this will matter. Not that it does now, either, actually.

There's Still Power in a Union (2)

With a wave of industrial action expected this summer in response to the Coalition’s severe programme of budget cuts, we hear voices from the Right and the Centre calling for a further ‘tightening’ of union strike laws. We see no reason to change the laws at the moment, the Tories say (and the Lib Dems warn, as if they were reluctant passengers), because at the moment things are working fairly well, but we may have to review the laws at some stage if the situation changes. As long as the unions co-operate with us, in other words, they’ll be fine. If they don’t, we’ll start making their lives difficult.

That’s a fine example of democracy for you, isn’t it? They’re not doing what we want them to, so we’ll make it harder for them to defy us. They say the unions do not have a sufficient mandate from their members for the next wave of strikes. Most members, they point out, didn’t cast a vote either for or against industrial action. Perhaps. Although there are issues about how furtive a union member has to be in the workplace to avoid being persecuted by his bosses (if you don’t believe me, try it); a union member in this shiny new consensual age puts a bull’s eye on his forehead if he talks about anything other than sex, alcohol, football or promotion opportunities – so what chance does he really have to refine his views on this or that issue if he can’t discuss it with people who are facing the same problems? If an employee was allowed to vote on union issues at his workplace the response to a ballot would be 100% either for or against recommendations from the executive; and then you’d really have democracy. Which is what employers, and the Government, fear most. The new corporate model they both favour has employees settling disputes individually – never, ever, collectively – through HR Departments, which are staffed by ambitious young men and women of a corporate inclination drawing their salaries from the same company you’re in dispute with. I think anybody with an objective eye can see the Grand Canyon-sized flaw there.

I wonder, anyway, who this present Government are to wish to change laws to stop megalithic institutions acting without mandates. Most of the British population didn’t vote at the last General Election because they have come to see all politicians as liars and grifters. And the Conservatives still couldn’t get a Parliamentary majority out of the people who did vote. They had to form an alliance with a party even less popular in the country than they were to be able to govern. If irresponsible action taken without mandate results in a punitive tightening of the laws relating to that action, then David Cameron and George Osborne should be prevented from entering the House of Commons with all haste. And Vince Cable should stop bullying trade unions on television news or be let loose on the streets with no money, no credit cards, no mobile phone, no belt for his trousers, and told not to come back to Westminster until he has found his conscience.

There’s Still Power in a Union (1)

When my friend was talking to me about the problems at his job last night I thought, and said (not for the first time either), "If everybody in the workplace joined a union it would make England a different country overnight." And it would. Most bosses say they don’t recognise unions and won’t negotiate with them; but if everybody was in a union, they would have to recognise them. So why don’t people join unions when pay and working conditions are dreadful for so many? A common thing you’ll hear in objection to unions – from people who can be bothered to engage in a discussion about it – is that the unions are "in it for themselves". Some unspecified person at your or my union’s head office is cynically using the union cause to seek publicity and profit. Well, it’s natural they’re going to get publicity during disputes and negotiations because the media is following them around asking for interviews. But what sort of masochist do we suppose would actively seek the kind of vilification union bosses receive during strikes? The press hates them, everybody who is mildly inconvenienced by the action they’re taking hates them … and the scorn poured on them by the Government would be enough to drive most rational men into spasms of vengeful rage.

I’m not sure where the supposition that the union bosses are making large amounts of money comes from. At senior level they’re doing a job and getting a salary for it, I suppose; but shouldn’t they? You could hardly run Unison nationally and double as a junior office worker. I wouldn’t have a clue how much the union bosses get paid to do their jobs – obviously I’m not as well informed as other people – but I would bet they don’t earn anything like the money the boss of your company earns while he or she is paying you peanuts for breaking your rear-end for forty hours a week. And the stewards in workplaces sensible enough to be unionised, if there are any left, do what they do for free. I know, I used to be one of those dangerous rabble-rousers.

"Well, the unions did nothing for my Auntie Sophie when she fell over a wet floor sign and had to be off work for a week," people will tell you.

"They did nothing for me when I was dismissed for ‘continual absence’," someone else will say, even though he wasn’t a member. "’Continual absence’ my arse. Can I help it if I have recurring migraines and intermittent back spasms? And depression? And cholic?"

I’ve heard these criticisms of unions all my working life as I tried to organise in places where they had no union. The preferred topic of office or shop floor conversation was usually who was fucking who, but if I did manage to steer us onto unions for a moment the measure of the validity of the union was always what it could do for the person I was trying to recruit, not what it might do one day for everybody. And had any of these people who’d supposedly had negative experiences with unions ever done anything about it? Had they ever complained to the union? Had the few who’d actually been members at one time or another put themselves forward as stewards and tried to organise so that the union could negotiate with their bosses from a position of greater strength? Of course they hadn’t; they’d just sat back and complained about the terrible way they were treated like the majority of us do in this country about everything from the weather to the planned obsolescence of white goods. And then they’d dismissed the union for being unable to defend cases that were pretty indefensible in the first place and let their membership lapse.

~~~~~~~~~~

Talking about trade unions with most people these days feels strangely like communicating down a tube from a parallel universe. It might sound logical to some when I say why unionisation is important, but for some reason the logic of it doesn’t apply in their reality. I’ve lost count of the number of people I gave union application forms to in my last job, but I don’t think any of the people who took a form actually joined; and then they were back complaining about pay and working conditions, harassment by the boss, even racism – all things a powerful union could have dealt with. Why is that? What is it that’s going on when a lot of people are experiencing some very real pain but they refuse to adopt the most obvious solution for dealing with it?

Fear and cynicism. Intellectual inertia. Most people can’t see outside the Capitalist ideological framework anymore and the revisionist historians have painted anything that isn’t supinely Capitalist as Communist. The majority have had their minds so corroded by mass media they don’t even see Capitalism as an ideology anymore; nor, for that matter, do they see Capitalism as Capitalism – it’s just the way we live: we work, we shop, we holiday, we work, we shop. And bastard bosses and ridiculous laws are part of that natural order. When an old grey-bearded pot-bellied curmudgeonly malcontent like me starts advising people to reject what’s being forced on them he might as well be teaching algebra in Japanese. To sea lions.

Jamie Cullum: The Triumph of the Dull

Last night, as I was waiting for my friend to arrive, I put the Radio Two Jamie Cullum Jazz Programme on for some diversion. Once again I have to conclude that he is the most boring man on radio. The dumbing-down of the jazz content on his show is bad enough – it avoids the seriousness of John Coltrane/ Sun Ra-era jazz the way Labour avoids any public connection with the unions – but Cullum’s vacuously enthusiastic twitterings drive me mad. The last time he was on I actually told the radio to shut up in an empty room. And then I turned it over. I should have known better last night too – same show, same presenter – but can I be blamed for my goofy optimism?

Eliza Carthy: Good Folk

Last night while I was doing other things on the internet I watched a programme about 'folksinger' (since we must classify everything) Eliza Carthy. It was narrated by one Tom Ravenscroft. He wouldn't be the son of grievously-missed John Peel (born John Ravenscroft) would he? or am I exhibiting a romantic side to my nature I would do better, in the defence of my hard-won image as an emotional ice block, to conceal? No matter. In addition to Mr. Ravenscroft, whoever he may be, the programme also featured Eliza herself (obviously, you might think, although if she gets very famous she will absent herself from such flummery), Billy Bragg, 'comedian's comedian' Stewart Lee and Eliza's parents 'folk legends' Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson. And I don't know why - who can say what happy commingling of astral forces and bodily courses makes these things come about - but from the beginning to the end of the show I was mesmerised by the music, the interviews, even the footage of green hills and long empty beaches that Eliza's words and singing were occasionally played over. Now, always one to be a decade or two (or three) late for the party, I have two new heroes: Eliza, who plays and sings so wonderfully - like John Peel my lexicon is limited when it comes to musical appreciation - I had completely forgotten about the other things I was doing before she'd even finished her second song; and her aunt (I think that's what she was) Lal Waterson, whom I've somehow contrived to miss entirely in thirty years spent mining the musical culture of the Sixties. That either tells you something about the androcentric nature of the music business and its new co-conspirator the nostalgia business, or it shows you what a sexist idiot I am. I can live with either, since it's not, I hope, too late for me. Lal seems to have written a body of marvellous songs in her too-short life, many of them strange and elliptical. The one in the show beguiled me utterly, whatever it was called! I will spend some time today and tomorrow looking up her songs on the internet, if they are available. Maybe there'll even be an album in HMV that an unrewarded, potless blogger can afford. Ask for details about my Paypal account in a private email, if you wish.

I was elated after the programme was over, as elated, actually, as only music makes me. So I didn't want to go to bed. I gave the kitchen a cursory clean and then I thought I'd sit down and see what the next programme would be. I had discovered the Eliza Carthy one by accident. Perhaps (he said, using a transparent rhetorical device) there would be jewels waiting for me in the next thing on the schedule. No. It was a multi-artist Celtic Connection 70th birthday tribute to Bob Dylan. Right up the alley, you might assume, of someone who confesses that 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' deprived him of his cultural virginity. But after hearing Carthy and Waterson play those traditional instruments and sing in those old English styles, Roddy Somebody & The Somebodies, the opening band, who did an extremely pedestrian electrified 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', were so flattening to my spirit I hated them. And then, of course, we saw the usual parade of talented artists gushing about Bob's genius and his unassailable body of work and how he has changed songwriting forever. That might be true, although I suspect it's cod history, but I didn't care anyway. I wanted to hear a fiddle. I wanted an accordion. I wanted something I didn't recognise straight away sung in a rich, accented voice that could squeeze and stroke the real human emotion out of the lyric. I wanted, in other words, folk music. I turned the Dylan tribute off half way through a lifeless and unconvincing 'Absolutely Sweet Marie', fed the cats, had a wee, and went to bed, where I wrote down the names of all the songs by Eliza and Lal that I could remember from the preceding programme before I turned out the light.

The Winter of Discontent: Rubbish Piled Up in the Mind.

In keeping with my current political mood - which seems to have been provoked by the appalling spectacle of Mr. Cleggeron in white shirt, tieless, with sleeves rolled up (have we really reached such an idiotic and transparent low in political propagandising?) walking around a hospital ward "listening" to nurses and patients - I watched an old documentary about one of my heroes Michael Foot this morning. In doing so I discovered something I'd forgotten long ago: those "memories" anti-Labourites and lazy political agnostics who don't want their consciences pricked or their inactivity disturbed haul out every time you talk about the years immediately before Thatcher - the ones about "rubbish piling up in the streets" and "bodies not being buried" because of the strikes - were actually grossly irresponsible sensationalist headlines from a Tory Party Political Broadcast! I'm sure it happened in a few places - it wasn't just the businessmen who had genuine grievances in those difficult times - but how fascinating it is, and how frightening, that something the majority of people would have experienced on television has become part of our collective memory. Although half of the people who regurgitate the cliches are too young to have been doing anything other than colouring in outlines of Disney characters in big floppy books at the groaning end of the Seventies.

The Tyranny of the Old

On Saturday that venerable old programme Desert Island Discs changed its format for a week and featured the 8 songs that listeners would wish to take with them to the hypothetical desert island. They had been writing and emailing their selections in for some time, it seemed. I immediately succumbed to the same temptation I imagine every other listener felt who hadn’t already sent in a selection and chose my own 8 songs, just for personal amusement (and to see if I couldn’t prove my intellectual and cultural superiority to my usual audience, the silent the walls of my living room at the Bard Gaff). This was the list I produced:

John Coltrane ‘Alabama’
Neil Young ‘Mansion on the Hill’
George Harrison ‘My Sweet Lord’
Elvis Presley ‘Mystery Train’
Bob Dylan ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’
Billie Holiday ‘Strange Fruit’
Fairport Convention ‘Mattie Groves’
Rolling Stones ‘Gimme Shelter’

(With Carl Perkins’ ‘Honey Don’t’ and Waylon Jennings’ ‘Honky Tonk Heroes’ waiting in the wings if any of the other bands couldn’t make it.)

Looking at my list today, and thinking about the artists and songs favoured by the listeners to the programme, I realised what a horrible display of middle- and old-aged complacency and close-mindedness both had been. Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’ and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (which ‘only an awful grouch could dislike’, said Miranda Sawyer, one of the guests on the show, much to the amusement of this awful grouch, who dislikes the song passionately) nestle in the BBC list alongside Edward Elgar and Beethoven. As far as I can recall, actually, there was nothing in the top eight songs voted for by listeners that came out after 1980. That’s 13 years before the birth of most of the people I’m studying with at the University. (At least I chose something from the early 90s, in Neil Young’s ‘Mansion on the Hill’, although as an artist he is really associated with the hippies.) I’m more than happy there was no presence of Madonna, Michael Jackson, or that scion of the Fiery Furnace Rihanna in either of our lists, but might there not have been at least one song by the Smiths, or Nirvana (to bring it back up to twenty years ago)? I’m no expert on things modern, musically – although seeing ‘d & b’ as I believe the youngsters call it, performed in the flesh had a surprisingly powerful effect on me – but if you don’t close yourself off to them, great songs are everywhere. It’s just that you might not hear them in the places you used to now that nostalgia has become an industry (Take That? Again?), genre programmes proliferate, and the traditional mainstream sources of new music have decided nobody wants to listen to anything that can’t be played at thunderous volume out of a shiney new growling open-top car by a bloke with greasy spiked-up hair and a miniature sculptured beard; or that gaunt lads in cheap trackie bottoms walking two Staffs on chained leads around the weedy, pot-holed streets of estates like the one I live on can’t enjoy when they skin up after the soaps have finished. My d & b experience, after all, took place in someone’s house, in a small room upstairs where an internet broadcast was going out. And I hear delightful music being played by buskers on the streets every day. (Okay, they’re usually playing other people’s songs, but you get my point. Don’t you? Don’t you?)

Paul Gambaccini, that unsurpassed near-Biblical authority on What’s Happening (he knew ‘Freddie’, we hear, so his titular right cannot be challenged), used the disparaging phrase ‘the tyranny of the modern’ to explain why Susan Boyle was in the list of top female artists that the listeners to the programme had voted for. But he expressed not even the faintest stirrings of boredom while discussing the inevitable occupation of the number one and number two positions in the male list by the Beatles and Bob Dylan (both of whom, apparently, are more important than Beethoven and Elvis Presley). I love the Beatles and Bob Dylan to distraction, as anyone who’s ever visited my Facebook page or talked to me for more than three minutes will know to their cost, and I am certainly not suggesting that older people should be self-consciously modern – it makes me cringe when people of my age say they like JLS, or whoever the current favourite manufactured moneymakers might be – but our claim to want another 1967 or another 1977 does begin to look a little dubious and self-deceiving when we continue to listen only to the purveyors of those musical ‘revolutions’ through and out onto the other side of dribbling middle age. Didn’t we watch our grandparents grow old with their Caruso and Frankie Laine LPs and feel, without acknowledging it, that they were throwbacks to some faraway dinosaur world?

If we love music and the effect it has on our lives we must be open. We must be receptive. That’s how we discovered new things in the first place. The good stuff seems thinner on the ground than it used to partly because we’ve grown older and are more rigid in our thinking, and partly because the Capitalist greedheads control the old media through which it was transmitted to us. But who said a song needs to be played to more than five people in a garage to justify its greatness? Who said a revolution needs to change the world of more than one person?

That was the thrill of rock and roll in the first place: you heard Elvis Presley or the Beatles or the Sex Pistols or the Stone Roses in a record shop and walked to the bus stop in the rain with your mind and your stomach turned upside down. You went back to your office job or your warehouse job the next day a hero. There could be a better songwriter than Bob Dylan scribbling out his or her first tentative lyrics in a basement two doors down from you right now. If there is she’ll probably be a checkout girl in Aldi in ten years while some group of profoundly uncharismatic late teens with made-up single names, whose every move is orchestrated by the next Simon Cowell, and whose songs are all written and produced for them by a record company hack who once had a track on a Wet Wet Wet album, make millions on tv talent shows and the giant stages of the world (if not Britain) (for a while). But hey, that’s rock and roll in the Corporate Age. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t give a Cadbury’s Twirl what the Saturday night armchair fatsoes who make demi-gods out of these ambitious no-hopers for a glorious six months think about music anyway. It's what we, the cognoscenti, know that counts.

When Grace Departed

Browsing around on YouTube this morning I found footage of Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock in ’69 singing ‘Somebody to Love’ (which isn't in the movie). What a mighty band they were with their powerful, complex, multi-layered songs and Grace, the most devastating frontman (person?) of the era - only the ingrained sexism and lack of imagination of critics and historians makes them say Jagger.   I flipped forward a little over a decade after that, drawn by a masochistic desire to wreck the high Grace's booming voice and startling blue eyes had put me on, and watched ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ by their Reaganite incarnation Starship. (Or were they Jefferson Starship? I dunno.) My memory of it turned out to be accurate: they were fucking hideous. Grace is still there out front but all of her charisma, all of the sexual power she had, is gone; and with her hair piled up on her head and a gaudy jacket on she looks like a groupie at an Elvis Presley concert. The rest of the band are dressed equally badly. And who are they?? Not at all the languorously cool, serious musicians of the Woodstock line-up (and if any of them are the same people time has played a cruel game with them). Has Grace just done a mid-period Dylan and hired a bunch of session players who’d do whatever she told them to? Did Grace even have any control over what she was doing then? I’d prefer to believe she didn’t. I’d rather think that the putrid recordings she made in the ‘80s were the result of some kind of terrible contractual impasse. But a lot of previously great artists were seized by madness in those days. It was as if the success of the new conservatism worldwide had convinced them that liberalism and non-corporate progressive rock and roll had disappeared forever, so everybody had to reposition themselves in the new world or starve. Even Bob Dylan had synthesizers on his albums; and he dressed himself up in his videos like an extra from ‘Miami Vice’.

Southbank at the Millenium: FML

It was December 31st 1999 and something was supposed to happen. It had been in the news for weeks. All the computers in the world were going to crash when midnight came because for one second it would be 00.00 hours on 01.01.00. For some reason they weren’t going to be able to cope with that, and when they couldn’t, we would be ‘hurled back into the Dark Ages’.

That night I was working. I was a carer at Southbank, a residential home in Kettering at the top of Northampton Road there. Looking out of the window in the big rear lounge, we had a tremendous view of half the town. I used to sit and look out of that window quite often when I was supposed to be working. I always imagined that I was somewhere else, or wrote poems in my head that I would transcribe in the toilet later on. But while I sat there I was sure to keep a pile of papers in my lap and a pen poised over them so anybody passing would think that I was busy. I was, after all, in charge while the manager was elsewhere; and I cared about team morale.

Joanie, who I worked with that night, was married to the guy who ran one of the hotels in town. She was off at ten o’clock to a big party/ fireworks display. “It’s such a shame you’re on the sleep-in,” she said at least three times during the evening. “You could have come with us. You could always have a bed at my house.” I didn’t want to tell her I’d volunteered to do the sleep-in because New Year’s Eve always made me morbidly depressed. I preferred to reflect on everything I’d lost, and every opportunity I’d missed, and everyone I’d accidentally hurt, by going to bed alone with a cup of tea and a sandwich than do all those things while watching a group of people getting drunk and whooping and hollering like lunatics. And anyway, in two hours we were going to be living in a state of primordial chaos, which made hot dogs and wine in paper cups seem rather inappropriate. Shouldn’t we be fletching arrows or something?

All of the residents, as we called them then, had gone to bed by the time Joanie left, all of them except Janet, a tiny, incredibly genteel woman with dementia, and Mylene, a profoundly deaf, and profoundly annoying, woman who always wore Manchester United football shirts and controlled every aspect of Janet’s life as if she were a simpleton. Mylene said she wanted to “see the New Year in”. My mother had always used that phrase and I’d never really understood it. Her dogged determination to stay up until midnight reminded me a little of Mum’s pathetic vigils on previous New Year’s Eves. I used to look at Mum watching the festivities on tv and think how much she deserved to be sharing that time with a man who loved her. But she’d hitched her horse to the wrong post too many years ago.

The night worker that night was Hugo. People have called me eccentric but Hugo was something else. A middle-aged man, reserved, even shy, but full of rectitude, stiff with arrogance; he seemed to think all of us were incapable of being right about anything, whether we were above him in the hierarchy or on an equal footing; and he hid this belief behind the most peculiar, twisted smile I’ve ever seen. He was a Scoutmaster, of all things, in his spare time. Most people who worked at Southbank, or at Elm Bank, the Respite place next door, liked him in spite of his personality; but everybody took the piss.

When the night worker came on duty in those days the sleep-in person gave him a handover and usually went to bed.The night worker then made a tour of the building, making sure everything was locked, emptying bins, looking for any work left undone that they could complain about in the morning. But I’d had too much coffee to go straight to bed, so when Hugo went on his rounds I made a sandwich and went to sit in the lounge with Janet and Mylene. They were planted in front of the tv. There was a film on.

‘They say the world is going to end at midnight, but I don’t think it will,’ said Mylene.

I moved in front of her so that she would be able to read my lips. Stopped chewing for a moment.’No, they don’t say the world’s going to end, just that the computer system’s going to collapse.’

‘Oh, is it?’ said Janet.

‘What would that mean? The world’s run by computers these days,’ said Mylene.

‘Yes it is. I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Pardon?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know what it would mean,’ I said, enunciating precisely.

I moved out of her line of sight so that she would stop talking to me. For a while we sat in silence watching the film. It wasn’t a bad one. One of those films you don’t think you'll like and then you see by accident and realise it’s all right. The light in the room was dim and I could feel the effects of the caffeine wearing off. For a while I dozed.

Mylene’s voice woke me. The BBC had started its inevitable broadcast from London. Serious people were talking sceptically about the global computer meltdown. But nobody seemed entirely sure of their assurances.

‘Oh look, they’re having so much fun! I wish I was there!’ Mylene said. ‘Can we go there next year?’

If we’re not hiding in cellars and at war with our neighbours, I thought.

If the NCC bastards haven’t closed Southbank by then, I thought. (There were plans in the offing.)

Then Hugo walked in with an ironing board and positioned it facing the tv. He plugged the house iron in and asked me to watch it for a moment as he went to get the residents' clothes. (The night worker had to iron the clothes of all the residents in the home each night. On the few night shifts I had done that job drove me crazy.)

‘The end of the world is coming then,’ Hugo said to me, attempting humour, breathing down his nose as he always did at the end of his sentence. It was like an aural full stop.

‘It’s not,’ Janet chided him.

I wish it was, I thought.

‘It might be a good thing if the computer system crashed,’ I said, trying to provoke Hugo. ‘That would really be a test of your mettle.’

‘I don’t think throwing all of the vulnerable people out into the streets and making them fend for themselves is a good idea,’ he said. (Nostril outbreath.)

‘I’m joking, Hugo. I’m joking.’

‘Some things aren’t funny.’

Minutes ticked by. Hugo ironed.The occasional hiss of his iron was all we could hear in the silence. Mylene made noises in appreciation of what was on the tv. It was almost midnight.

‘Here comes the countdown,’ Hugo said, as the tv broadcast went back live to Trafalgar Square. ‘Are you ready?’

In our lounge and on the tv they chanted in unison. The only voice missing was mine.

‘Five … four … three … two … one … HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!’

I looked out over the town and saw fireworks exploding in two different places, throwing showers of brilliant light up into the sky. Mylene and Janet hugged each other. Hugo smiled, snorted, and continued ironing.

‘Well, we’re still here,’ he said after a moment, as more fireworks went off in the town. The tv was reporting that computers appeared to have adjusted to the new date without difficulty. So it was all a big fuss over nothing, they said, with sophisticated smirks on their faces. Something to tell the grandchildren, they said.

I wondered if I’d tell the grandchildren where I had spent the most epochal moment of my generation. In a care home? Watching tv? While a Scoutmaster did the ironing? Small wonder I hadn’t written anything worth a shit despite having the potential to outwrite all but the best of the living poets and novelists. My life was so boring and inconsequential even Alan Bennett would not have been able to cull something from it.

That night as I got undressed, with a sense of utter failure clawing at me, I decided to save what was left of my soul by quitting and getting into something else. Something brave. Something exciting. Something that befitted the piratical spirit of all great art. And eleven years later I did it. 

Yes, We All Love Him (Well, It's The Law): Barack Obama In London

 Barack Obama’s speech to the Houses of Commons and Lords yesterday was mind-numbingly dull. Perhaps that isn’t surprising if you’ve been following him more closely than I have; my interest in politics comes and goes, usually as the tension in my own life increases or decreases as a result of forces completely unrelated to national or international affairs. The last full speech of Obama’s that I heard, actually, was the famous “Yes We Can” speech he made just before he became President. That was almost a miracle of inspirational rhetoric. Perhaps his speeches have been losing their lustre for a long time as he faces up to the grim reality of having to deliver on his promises. But yesterday he sounded flatter than a squashed carcass on the A43 road to Kettering.

The highlight of the speech, according to the radio, was the moment when he hauled out the increasingly dreary chestnut about his being the grandson of a Kenyan farmer or leather belt manufacturer or British Army van driver (whatever it was that his grandfather did), and how his current position as President of the United States proves how remarkable American democracy can be. Undoubtedly he’s right. But somehow the continual restating of the fact of his ancestry manages not only to patronise his grandfather, but also to provide all the wrong people with all the tools they need to continue to marginalise the millions from ethnic minorities who will be lucky if they can live on the same street as a white person one day without being accused of taking over the neighbourhood. The gales of applause he received from the assembled politicians and unelected gentry for reminding them about his ancestry yet again were hideously embarrassing for precisely that reason. Although some of the crowd may have been clapping just to keep themselves awake for long enough to make it to the end of the great rhetorician’s speech.

Rejoicing in the killing of enemies of war. Drinking Guinness in an Irish Bar for the cameras of the world. Serving hamburgers to war veterans with David Cameron. Selling your own heritage like a manufacturer of t-shirts. To paraphrase the last great hope of democracy Hunter S. Thompson, how low do you have to stoop to be President of the United States?

Looking for Lucia Joyce

It occurred to me this morning that I can print off the Prajnaparamita and Diamond Sutras rather than waiting for them to appear in book form (and being able to afford them). Then I can study them alongside my revision for the exams and my reading of James Joyce's Ulysses.

I'm up in Kingsthorpe now, though - 9a.m. Sunday morning, on a beautiful cool sunny day - to find (at last) the grave of Lucia, Joyce's daughter. I don't know why I've wanted to make this trip for so long - don't know why I've put it off for so long either - but here I am. I was thinking as I walked up from Semilong: how fitting this is, I have to walk for 45 minutes and then journey around Kingsthorpe Cemetery in circles with no guarantee of success, to locate physical evidence of Lucia, but her father I can pick up off my bookshelf.

On the way up, two Care Assistants with regulation cardigan over blue uniform sitting on the wall outside the E.P.H. smoking. Great anti-corporate image! Then somebody in full expensive shop window jogging outfit canters past holding regulation drinks bottle. Parked a little way up the street is a police car.

Now I'm in the park across the road from the Cock Hotel. I used to come here sometimes when I worked at ****. I'd just sit and have lunch in peace, listening to the traffic rushing past on the road just over the old stone wall. It's probably in old journals. (I hope if someone reads these things when I'm gone and finds negative stuff in them they can see under that and don't take it personally or think I was just a nasty old man hiding behind a congenial smile. I can be that but I don't think it's my default setting.) (Mememememe.) There are hundreds of cigarette butts on the ground around the bench I sit on. And twenty feet away a dropped, torn plastic bag with empty beer bottles in it - green glass shards strewn all over the footpath.

In the grass by the bushes over there a really tiny rabbit; and overhead a pigeon furiously beats its wings in the trees.

Ghost man hurries down the lane in blue suit and tie. Grey hair on his head and he's still being responsible.

I've found the graveyard (9.50). Now I'm going to look for the grave. I feel like Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, contemplating all these stones. But by coming here I'm setting Lucia free from conservative, patriarchal constructions of sanity and reality. David Cameron's 'sane', for Christ's sake. Lucia was just an early sister of the Global Literary Renaissance - 'lucky to be nutty,' as Allen Ginsberg says - and if her father wasn't a lunatic by the time he wrote Finnegan's Wake all bets are off.


                                     #################################

I walked around the graveyard for an hour but I couldn't find Lucia (where are you for fuck's sake Luce?) I found lots of Joyces, but the majority of those were first names. I found a fair few Norahs too; but no Lucia. Still, there was a whole section of the graveyard I didn't visit. If it hadn't been so warm, and my feet hadn't been complaining so loudly, and if there had been that necessary companion of all middle-aged people, a toilet, in the vicinity, I might have tried. But having a seizure and/ or pissing myself might have spoiled the experience somewhat.

I found an Askew and a Lovesy in different plots. I also found an Atack (one 't'), a Spittle (two), and - ironically, considering the Eli Wallach associations - a Stanton. Everyone of those people loved by someone. Missed by someone. Born from someone.

Existence in this world, this universe, this dimension, this form, is something we need lifetimes to get a handle on. (A fly and an insect on my page as I write, back in the park near the Cock Hotel, sitting underneath a tree in shade like Buddha. The insect just flew away but the fly clings on as the loose page flaps in the wind. Now he's gone like Askew, Lovesy, Atack, Spittle, Stanton, Hodder.) We need everything that exists around us to continue living so that we can live. Life somehow multiplies into grass, trees, butterflies, bees, supermarket vendors. How does it know to do that? We get 80 years if we're lucky to live and work out our karma, but we spend it working, blaming our parents because we feel shitty; we waste it killing ourselves with cigarettes, fucking up our brains with alcohol and drugs that help us face up to problems which either aren't really there, or which we could put behind us just by looking in the mirror and laughing.

We waste our time by chasing money, seeking happiness (you already ARE happy, idiot, unless you're working in a Zimbabwean diamond mine or something). We waste our time writing stuff like this in journals. Although I'm just acting a movie out in my head really, pretending I'm a combination of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Snyder writing hairy Buddhist wisdom to tear the Academies asunder and lead children into exile. I hesitate to say it, but since she came into my life I don't really want anything except food in my belly and somewhere warm to sleep at night. The blue sky over my head during the day and her love for as long as she sees fit to give it.

transcription of author's journal writings 11/04/11

n.b. askew and lovesy are significant because family name of friends of the author

Email to Sarah Uldall

Sarah Uldall is running for the Liberal Democrats in my ward in the local council elections in Northampton, U.K. on May 5th. Here is the email I am sending her after discovering unwanted LibDem campaign literature on my doormat when I came home yesterday.

6^th April 2011
                                                     

Dear Sarah Uldall,

Recently I left a note at my door asking for no Liberal Democrat newsletters or campaign leaflets to put through my letterbox. So imagine how disappointed I was to come home today and find another edition of your Focus on my doormat.

Please stop sending me this material. Quite apart from your rudeness in ignoring my original request, I do not read anything either you or your new ideological bedfellows the Conservative Party send, so you are wasting your time. It all goes straight into the bin.

As far as I am concerned the local Liberal Democrats are inseparable from the national Liberal Democrats; and your Westminster masters, after misrepresenting themselves and their agenda shamelessly to con disaffected Labour supporters into voting for them, are conspiring with the Conservative Party to terrorise the poor and dispossessed, dismantle public services and make Britain – through assaults on higher education and the N.H.S. – a more socially divided nation than it has been since Charles Dickens died.

We expected that from the Conservative Party. But I am not alone in being appalled at the spectacle of supposedly liberal politicians colluding with a Tory programme no less extreme than that of Margaret Thatcher. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have made themselves grotesque by giving into their ambition, and history will forgive David Cameron much sooner than they are forgiven.

So as I have said before, do not send me any more of this gibberish. I intend to vote Labour on May 5^th and that wouldn’t be changed by an avalanche of badly-written nonsense about fly tipping and bin collections. But I do not want your literature in my house, period.

Sincerely,

Bruce Hodder