While book hunting the other day I found this little treasure. It's 'Job Morbid's Pilgrimage', a collection of poetry from 1857, a first edition if I'm not mistaken, by a poet who calls himself or herself 'D.R.M.' Now, I have a reasonable knowledge of English literature. But I'd never heard of a D.R.M. before. I was, naturally, intrigued.
I bought the book and when I got home, looked up D.R.M. on the internet. Perhaps I don't know where to look, but I found nothing. Only multiple copies of 'Job Morbid' on different Amazon sites around the world, some listing the author as D.R.M., some listing him/ her as R.M.D., and one that said 'author unknown'. Unfortunately, none of them have Amazon's 'Look Inside' facility. If they did I might be able to satisfy my curiosity by reading some work of diligent scholarship in an introduction.
A Twitter friend consulted the Bodleian digital library for me and found another book by the same author called 'Ephemeral Effusions'. The physical copy was admitted to the Bodleian in 1928. It was published privately in 1856, a year before 'Job Morbid'. I've read most of that now, seeing if I can find any clues about the identity of D.R.M., and I've begun to create a tentative picture of this lost--and it must be said, perfectly good--poet. It could be a wildly inaccurate picture, but I have no scholarly reputation to endanger by posting it here.
D.R.M. was either a public figure concerned about his reputation, or a woman. I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She went to school in Henley, but her family was from Devon. One poem is 'Addressed to the High Sheriff of Devon for the Year 1845'. That was Edward Simcoe Drewe, of the Drewe family of Broadhembury, long-term residents of the Grange.
D.R.M describes herself, in the poem, as 'a humble scion of that house'. But she is not Edward Simcoe Drewe's daughter. She says, 'My father! oh! blest spirit now at rest,' before going on to praise Edward Simcoe's generosity and charity, saying he 'worthily supports the name he bears.' Might the D. in D.R.M. have been inverted? The need for that in a privately published book containing a poem so easy to decode is questionable. But still. Perhaps she hoped to use the book to help her find a publisher in London, in which case discretion would have been appropriate, given the restrictions placed on women then. A year later, she did find a publisher. I am tempted to read something salacious into her description of herself as 'humble', a possibility which would make my inversion theory even more applicable, but that's probably going too far
Where does D.R.M. stand in the family genealogy? Since I have no birth date for her, this is harder to pin down. Is she in her forties or fifties at mid-century? If she is, she might be the daughter of John Rose Drewe and Dorothy Bidgood. They are described, bizarrely, on genealogy sites as having left 'no male children.' Might there, then, have been a daughter? And might that explain the middle 'R' in her pen name? Is it possible I'm wildly off target and none of these suppositions are even close to the truth?
Yesterday was the anniversary of the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, who has been one of my favourite writers since I first came across his work in Rolling Stone in 1985. I remember the magazine and the year with an unusual (for me) accuracy because the article, a ten-year-old account of the fall of Saigon, made the sort of impression on me that readers only experience once or twice in their lifetime. His prose was remarkable. He used song lyrics as epigraphs. He slipped occasionally into bizarre flights of fancy. And behind all the showmanship there was an intellectual and philosophical depth I had only expected, up to that point, from poets and folk singers.
After that first article I read both Fear and Loathing books and The Great Shark Hunt. Shark Hunt collected then-contemporary as well as much older journalism by Hunter. It was a proper history of the previous twenty years in America from a perspective that became increasingly skewed as the author grew into his mature style. And that style, though it had evolved in very different cultural conditions, seemed a perfect response to the humourless, cruel, repressive social atmosphere of the 1980s.
Through his fantastic success, of course, and aided unwittingly by a newspaper strip which parodied him, Hunter created a public image which eclipsed his great talent as a writer. The public thought of him as a drug-addled maniac, celebrating him because he did everything they lacked the courage to do. I was guilty of that myself, to some extent. And to a large extent, the public image of Hunter was true; he even played up to it. In the end, however, he became a prisoner of it, like a master magician who does the same conjuring trick night after night because it pleases the crowd but forgets, eventually, how to do anything else.
One article about Hunter after he died was titled The Day the Fun Stopped. It was fun. And it has been much less fun ever since -- I sometimes watch Donald Trump on television and imagine the savaging he would have had from Hunter with such sadistic pleasure, it makes me sad all over again that Thompson has gone. Yes, it was fun when he was here. Probably the most fun a writer has ever given us. But it was so much more than that too. Hunter, to my mind, was a genuinely great writer until he burned himself out. Maybe one day we'll look through the fog of the years with enough clarity for a lot more people to see that.
Can the artist and the work ever be separated? I have been having this discussion with other poets and a painter friend lately. I love the poetry of Ezra Pound. But Pound was an anti-Semite. Does enjoying his work make me an anti-Semite too? I love the poetry of Ted Hughes. Does that mean I approve of men having multiple relationships simultaneously? And are the achievements of either poet, or any of the other great poets, writers, painters and musicians of history to be nullified by our disapproval of the lives of their creators?
I can't really disapprove of Ted Hughes. I once slept with a woman knowing she was married, and I didn't give a moment's thought to her husband; she excited me, and I wanted her. But I do believe someone gets hurt when a trusted partner starts thinking it's all right to sleep with other people. It might not always be the person you expect, but it will happen. Ted Hughes lost a wife and a partner to suicide. He was unquestionably attracted to emotionally complex women whose apparent fire was a mask for terrible fragility. He cheated on both of them. Whether he bore full responsibility for their deaths or not is highly debatable. I've read widely on the subject and I don't think he did. But he was vilified for decades because of Plath.
I have believed for a while now that we are becoming more moralistic, more puritanical, more aggressively judgemental, on the political left. They've always played at that on the right while allowing for themselves licence to do anything they wanted regardless of the consequences. But we mean it, and we police ourselves as rigourously as we throw brickbats at the enemy. Do I want to belong to a movement in which I have to run every sentence I write by a committee before it's published? Should I have to prove my worth by making sure I tick every ideological box?
It's obvious to me that an artist's work is a product of the artist's mind, his/her experiences, perceptions, misconceptions. Pound's greatness (I think he's great) even in the early poems, comes from a set of attitudes and values which were ripe for conversion into fascism given the necessary external stimuli -- which, in my opinion, were the carnage of WWI and his move to Italy. His anti-Semitism, as he later said himself, was a 'stupid, suburban prejudice', and hardly uncommon in America or England; it was the decay of his mind that made it quite so virulent.
Hughes, likewise. His isolated Yorkshire upbringing, hunting animals with his brother in the woods, alongside the development of his colossal but unusual intelligence, made him ripe, in such a conservative, patriarchal society, for a self-serving and uniquely pretentious take on relationships . He wrote the best mainstream English poetry of his generation from a mind that saw the world as one in which primordial forces were at work, and male desire meant something, although I'm puzzled what. Hughes wrote in the programme of a performance of Gaudete:
This changeling proceeds to interpret the job of ministering the Gospel of Love in his own log-like way. He organizes the women of the parish into a coven, a love society. And the purpose of this society, evidently, is to produce the Messiah.
I can't read that without a straight face. To me, it's an excuse for a man to get his knob out and exploit as many women as he can. But Hughes took it seriously, at least as a mythical representation of some deeper truth, whatever that truth might be.
I doubt I would have liked Pound or Hughes very much as men. I don't think they would have liked me either. I refuse to give up on their work, however, just because their ideas don't chime with my own. Their books are too precious to me, and there's a sort of intellectual fascism in junking writers who take inconvenient or offensive positions which has no place in civilized debate. No one died because of Pound. I've heard his broadcasts; he would have been an irritant to the Allied generals and politicians, but only Ezra would have believed in his influence. People did die around Hughes, but people have died around me who I could have helped much more than I did. The hurt I've caused others in my life is incalculable. Is anybody such a paragon of virtue that they can dismiss a mad poet, or an arrogant poet, out of hand and damn them to Hell forever?
Boris Johnson tweets that Winston Churchill 'saved this country from a barbaric fascist and racist tyranny'. Sorry, mate, but Winston wasn't up in Lancaster bombers risking his neck night after night like my old history teacher Bill Lanning. Winston wasn't held in a German POW camp like Michelle's dad Bernard. Winston didn't lose his mind while being tortured in a Japanese POW camp like my great uncle Sonny. Winston didn't crack the Enigma code like Alan Turing, who our great country persecuted to death because of his sexuality. Winston didn't lose his country and then join the Allies like those Polish pilots who flew during the Blitz. But it was Winston who excluded them from the post-war victory parade because they weren't British. He played his part. But it is ordinary people who win wars and ordinary people who suffer and grieve because they're fought.
It's been hard to feel hopeful about American politics for a long time. Well, two years at least. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with a handful of others who emerged during the mid-term elections, makes hope possible again.
Who is she? I didn't have a clue until just after her Democratic primary victory in June. Then I saw this engaging young woman on Stephen Colbert's show, I think it was, who according to the interview had caused the biggest electoral upset in decades. She was 29, or actually 28 then, and she called herself a socialist.
I knew that two years of septuagenarian Republican misrule in the White House had got America in the mood for a change. I also knew that Bernie Sanders had almost won the 2016 nomination, and stirred young American voters into a genuine semi-radical fervour, while campaigning under the socialist banner. But I wasn't expecting anybody else to get away with it.
Ocasio-Cortez was the real socialist deal as well. Joe Crowley, who she challenged in the primary, spent $3.4 on his campaign. Ocasio-Cortez spent $194,000 and nearly 75% of her donations were small contributions from individual voters. Less than 1% of Crowley's were. She won.
This approach to the funding of political campaigns, of course, dramatically reduces the opportunity for corruption by denying lobby groups access to the people in power. How different would America have been, I wonder, in the last two years if the NRA hadn't given hundreds of thousands of dollars to members of the Republican Party?
I knew that if we were going to win, the way that progressives win on an unapologetic message is by expanding the electorate. That's the only way that we can win strategically. It's not by rushing to the center. It's not by trying to win spending all of our energy winning over those who have other opinions. It's by expanding the electorate, speaking to those that feel disenchanted, dejected, cynical about our politics, and letting them know that we're fighting for them - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
In the November mid-terms Ocasio-Cortez faced Republican nominee Anthony Pappas, an economics professor at St. John's University, and won a seat in Congress with 78% of the vote. Pappas didn't vigorously contest the seat because Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one in the district. But her win was still resounding.
Since her election Ocasio-Cortez' already-high media profile has gone stratospheric, partly because of her brave, principled, intelligent campaigning on a number of progressive issues (healthcare and the environment in particular); her visibility, for a politician still very new to the game, also trumps (if you'll pardon the word) everybody else's because of her skilled use of Twitter and Instagram. If recent Washington committees are anything to go by, Ocasio-Cortez may be one of the few people holding political office who knows what to do with a mobile phone. It's a shame she joins the President in that woefully exclusive club.
Predictably when an unapologetically clever young woman with good ideas emerges there is tremendous hostility. The conservative media and the more vituperative element of the Republican Party hate Ocasio-Cortez. They heap so much abuse on her you'd think she had declared herself a candidate for 2020. And that fear may be lurking in the back of their fetid minds: 2020 might be too early, but what about 2024? All the Democrats really need is a star to drive a truck through the discredited policies and personalities of their Republican rivals.
It comes down to misogyny, though, basically, doesn't it? Isn't that why commentators who defend a president with no rhetorical ability at all and a desperate need for a proof reader mock her intelligence? A woman isn't supposed to be as smart as she is. And if she is smart she's supposed to put her smarts in the service of maintaining the patriarchal system that views smart women with hostility and suspicion. She's meant to help prop up the unjust oppressive capitalism that still pays women less than men and doesn't want people like her in the boardroom. Which, if you think about it, wouldn't be very smart of Ocasio-Cortez at all.
Long may she put a chill up their spines, I say.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Suffolk Punch Person of the Year 2018.
Uncomfortable birthdays...Little Harrowden Primary School...the tin-legged farmer and the willy incident
Tomorrow I will be 54 years old. Sixty in six years, if I make it that far. Fuck, where did it go? I can still remember the school playground at Little Harrowden Primary, and most of the kids running around in it. I remember how we used to be able to see the flame burning in one of the high silver towers of Corby steelworks tiny in the distance if we stood in the right place. Ten years later steel in Corby would be dead because of Margaret Thatcher's march of progress.
I remember standing with the rest of the school in the playground watching an eclipse of the sun. The admonition of the teacher that looking directly at the sun would blind us never left me; I am still, even today, awestruck by the terrible power of a star that can blind you from 93 million miles away. And when I picture that playground I still see the farmer who owned the adjoining fields, Mr. Belgrove, chasing Robert Tilley back through the gate aiming a kick of his tin leg at the boy's backside because he'd ventured into the fields, calling him a dozen names none of us had ever heard before as he tried to catch him.
And before those memorable scenes from a childhood that still seems within touching distance came the willy incident. That was in the older part of the school, near the bottom of School Lane, where there were buildings that were easily 100 years old, if not more, with girls and boys toilets of similar antiquity across a tiny playground used only, I believe, by the first years. So when the willy incident happened I was probably 5 or 6.
I had been to the toilet. When I came out I was met by three girls in my class who asked me to show them my willy. Never one to turn down a reasonable request, and as keen to make people happy then as I am now, I did as they asked and took my little pre-pubescent willy out. And wouldn't you know, all three girls ran off screaming and crying and reported me to the headmaster. I can't remember how much trouble I got in, but I probably had a serious talking-to at least.
It's so weird, with my 54th birthday coming fast over the hill, to think that that happened half a century ago. It's weird, and a little sad, although the memory is a warm and funny one. What's even weirder is that my mother died when she was 54. So I will be as old as Mum. I'm sure that happens all the time, but it shouldn't when the child is still young enough to recognise most of the current pop stars.
This week I've been learning about Blaze Foley. There's a movie about him directed by Ethan Hawke, a name I usually take to be a fair indicator of quality when it's attached to a product; it's out in America now, I think, the film, but when and if it will get to the UK I couldn't tell you. Maybe we'll see it on Netflix. They have a lot of Ethan's stuff.
But back to Blaze. I'd never heard of him until I read about the movie, and I've been listening to country music for forty years. In fact, one of the first albums I ever bought was Guy Clark's 'Old No. 1'. I also realized, early, mainly thru cover versions of his songs by other artists, that Townes Van Zandt was a genius, and a better poet than any of the boring versifiers they foisted on us at school, except maybe Shakespeare, although then I didn't realize how great Shakey was.
Townes' albums, for some reason, were hard to get in Wellingborough, where I grew up. He didn't get played much on Radio 2's Country Club programme either. It was the cooler Bob Stewart show on Radio Luxembourg that gave Townes at least one full concert that I can remember. Unfortunately the reception on those old pre-digital radios was terrible at night when you listened to faraway stations. Townes might have been singing on Mars.
I don't remember Blaze Foley ever being played on the radio stations I listened to, and he definitely didn't get onto British tv. His music, when you listen to it now, makes that seem like a grave historical injustice.
He's fucking great, don't you think? And while he was working his ass off in the US we were being forced to listen to Crystal Gayle and Billie Joe Spears. But when you read just a little about his life, his obscurity becomes less surprising.
According to Wikipedia, the masters of his first album were confiscated by the DEA. The masters of another album were stolen from a station wagon Blaze was living in. A third album was lost until years after Blaze died.
How could anybody with so much talent, you wonder, have so much bad luck? when artists with so little talent become global superstars and make vast fortunes writing terrible songs? It seems with Blaze -- and I never knew the guy so I'm drawing conclusions from what I read -- that his obscurity, while living, was partly at least the result of a chaotic lifestyle and a self-destructive streak. Bad luck has to be a factor too. Some people just don't make it.
But as Blaze (played by Ben Dickey) says in the movie, 'I don't want to be a star, I want to be a legend.'
Congratulations, man. You have people in other countries digging through your archives and telling each other stories about a crazy genius who lived in a tree house and covered himself in duct tape. I think you made it.
I just got an email from Northampton Central Library inviting me to interview for a volunteer post.
I applied to be a volunteer at the Library before I saw the permanent vacancy. I then applied for that, and, as my regular reader will know, I didn't get it. The cynic in me says my offer to work for them for nothing probably didn't advance my cause terrifically well.
The email about the volunteer post says I might not get that either. I have to discuss with them my interest in the post, and they have to decide whether they can match me to a particular role.
It feels like I'm applying for the secret service. The Library is about book-lending, IT, education, and arts events primarily. I'm a published poet and erstwhile tutor and arts event curator writing my arts blog on a Lenovo laptop. How much more suitable for a job could a person be?
But it doesn't matter, because I'm not going to the volunteer interview anyway. I am too proud to run the risk of being turned down twice by the same employer. I don't want to give them my hours for free, either, when they weren't prepared to pay me.
I'll go and volunteer somewhere else while I have a little time on my hands, somewhere they won't make me jump through hoops for the privilege of doing them a favour.
It's signing on day again. This afternoon I have to go to the Job Centre and have something called a work booklet inspected by a Job Centre employee, who sits on the other side of a desk in an open-plan office where everyone nearby can hear what you say. As usual on signing on day, I woke up this morning with a dark mood hanging over me like those personal thunder clouds in the old cartoons. I hate signing on. I don't know anyone who likes it.
I have been writing in my work booklet for the last two weeks. The first section I wrote in is called 'I will'. In that, I recorded my plan of action re: 'jobseeking' for the fourteen days between appointments. The second section is called 'What I did and what was the result'. It's like primary school all over again, except I'm no longer a child.
If the details I have entered into both sections are approved, the Job Centre employee signs their name in an indecipherable squiggle at the bottom of the page and I am awarded less money for a week than I was earning for one shift at the warehouse.
It's usually very civilised, as long as you play the game, keep your temper, don't give in to the sometimes overwhelming feelings of embarrassment and shame caused by the situation you're in. If you let it get to you, or if, as I have seen on a couple of occasions, sheer desperation drives you over the edge -- some people in there are hungry, facing homelessness, some actually are homeless -- there are always plenty of security guards on hand to bounce you out of the building.
The system protects itself. You, unless you're docile and obliging, are on your own.
But, according to a man I heard in a hospital waiting room earlier, people like me are lazy and work-shy, content to let everybody else keep the country running while we lay in bed until the afternoon and smoke and drink all day. So if we find the fortnightly signing on appointment a bit of an ordeal, we bring it on ourselves.
HOW THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY DECLARED WAR ON THE POOR
When I got off the bus beside the BBC building this morning, the first thing I saw was a group of young people wrapped up against the cold looking up at the Christmas decorations that have been erected over Abington Street. I presume that's what they were doing. Somebody might have been gesticulating at them from an upper floor of the Beeb.
It's too early in the year for me to feel in the festive mood. I was turned down for a job at Weston Favell Library yesterday as well, and the sense of rejection I have from that still smarts a bit. Obviously a First in English Lit, ten years experience of team leading, two years experience of tutoring and my famous charm weren't what they were looking for. Or perhaps they were looking for someone not in his fifties and without epilepsy.
Homelessness is my major festive buzz kill in Northampton, though. Abington Street's vacant shop doorways, abandoned by businesses that collapsed in the safe fiscal hands of the Tories, are filling up with people who have nowhere to sleep. I counted three under blankets or inside tents and two sitting upright on the wet ground asking quietly for spare change.
Across the street from the church I saw two more homeless people. One looked delighted just to be acknowledged by a little girl who passed with her mum. He said, 'Have a nice day.'
Meanwhile hundreds of us, including me, walked by with our bags-for-life full of shopping, half-price bargains picked up in the Black Friday sales, Argos packages containing new televisions, trees for Christmas.
The disconnect between the have and the have-not is not as severe as it seems, of course. We were going to buy a tree, but neither of us is working. The money for it comes from an unexpected tax rebate, and from the need to have at least a few days of pleasure in the middle of the struggle to keep our heads above water financially. I bet a few more of those shoppers drawing discreet circles around the rough sleepers are only a paycheck away from penury themselves.
So what is going on? I've been unemployed before. It's almost inevitable when your only true commitments are to love and poetry. But I've never known a time, in nearly forty years of political awareness, when a town as small as Northampton had become so poor, when the social fabric had broken down so completely, that little girls had to learn about homelessness before they were old enough to go to school. That sort of shit was supposed to have been on the way out in the generation before mine.
The present government, it's clear, has declared war on kindness, decency, civility, morality and any notion of society that acknowledges our responsibility for one another. Why? Because all of those qualities and ideals get in the way of profit and diminish their individual power. And I'm really worried about where it's going to end up, because as bad as it has become, there's still no sign that the British people are getting the message in large enough numbers to remove the Tories from office and toss them on the political dumpster where they belong.
Which is fine, in a way. It's your democratic right to be the sort of suicidally gullible jackass who signs his own death warrant. But when you do, you take me and everybody I love down with you.
In amongst the other activities that have kept me from this blog for a while, I've been reading 'I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg' (City Lights). This book was published in 2015, but I've been waiting for it to come down in price before I bought it.
I found Ginsberg's correspondence with Gary Snyder, published a few years earlier, curiously uninteresting given that I love both poets. But this book really sings. Ferlinghetti, after all, was the man whose head was on the block for putting out Howl and Other Poems. We get his first-hand account of the Howl trial in these pages, and it creates a palpable sense of how thrilling and frightening it must have been.
Unexpected, for me, was Ferlinghetti's insecurity about his own craft. I'd always taken him, no questions asked, to be a great, quirky, eccentric poet. I thought everybody felt the same. But the other writers in his orbit put him down and more than once he asks Ginsberg for reassurance about his work. Allen, in his replies, is more than a little perfunctory, and condescending too, offering suggestions for edits that actually don't improve the poems at all.
One area in which Ferlinghetti isn't insecure, however, is in his own intellectual judgement. He yields to Ginsberg's pressure about publishing Antler, but refuses to concede that Antler is the genius Allen insists he is. And about Chogyam Trungpa, who I have always considered a charlatan, Lawrence is openly scornful:
I agree with Merwin, I agree with Peter Marin, I agree with Gary, I agree with Rexroth---what are you doing defending this petty dictator, and who needs experiments in monarchy at this point in the U.S.? (Ferlinghetti to Ginsberg, February 24th 1980).
Ginsberg resented the suggestion, made by a biographer at the time, that his poetry was better before he became involved with Chogyam Trungpa. To whatever extent it did decline, I'd say the reasons were far too complex to be laid at the shiny shoes of one alcoholic phony dharma lion in a business suit. Allen had had a history since Columbia of defending the indefensible and seeing genius in the behaviour of his friends where other people saw only selfishness, crudity and mental illness.
Went last night with a group of poets, a playwright and some interested onlookers to a public reading of John Clare's poetry in the dim light of the Guildhall Courtyard in Northampton. We stood or sat around the Clare statue there, the group about ten strong, and most read poems either by Clare, or work in the spirit of the so-called Peasant Poet; someone who's appearing in a play about Clare at the Abington Park Museum on Sunday recited part of that. You could tell he was accustomed to the stage: his voice projected powerfully over the noise of the traffic and the group on the steps at the other end of the courtyard loudly chattering.
I mention no names because the only person I knew there was Jimtom Keith Thomas James, Northampton's best living poet (myself not included). Jimtom, in kilt and red Cymru jacket, shuffled next to Clare's statue to read, demonstrating rightful kinship maybe, then picked a poem at random and read it beautifully. I declined when the organiser looked at me. I stopped reading in public a long time ago, and it's bad for my epilepsy if I read in poor light.
The discussion at the beginning of the reading gave a rather sentimentalised view of Clare and his mental health problems, I thought. He had seven children to support, according to the source I consulted, with little money to support them. He drank too, and seems to have had a complex relationship with the peasant life he is supposed to be the lyrical embodiment of. While stating that 'with the old dish served to my forefathers, I am content', he also dismissed his neighbours as 'insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.' That's a baseless snobbery I have been guilty of more than once in my life. Another poet with no money and no recognition (at least he'd had it once) living among the commoners.
As for Clare's illness, he was probably a little bit 'mad', as even polite people said in those days, from the very beginning. All creativity comes from a dysfunctional relationship with what is presumed to be reality. Artists in all mediums sit, think, imagine, dream, play, re-invent, while life is going on around them; they absorb the world around them through different processors. There is always a part of them not in the physical space most people occupy. Or I imagine they occupy it; I wouldn't know, being a lifelong fantasiser and not remotely connected to that mysterious multitude considered 'normal'. But what happens when dreams and fancies collide with the brute realities of the world? Then you have confusion.
Then you have anger. Or the suffocation of anger in depression.
Then you have breakdown.
Then you have imagining you're Lord Byron and ending up in the crazy house.
This may not be the textbook definition of the stages of mental illness, but it's been my experience more than once.
I was walking down Market Street in Kettering with Michelle this morning, remembering my friend Salvatore who worked in a long-gone clothes shop there in the early 80s, when I noticed a bookshop I'd never seen before. 'Bookshop!' I said to Michelle. I'd thought there were none this side of Leicester, Waterstone's branches excluded.
Bookcave Limited is situated inside a shopping district called the Yards, which looks like it would literally have housed, long ago, yards; it's an open space off Market Street with buildings on all sides. But the buildings have been redeveloped, adapted and beautifully painted, so that the space feels more like a haven than a commercial area.
The shop itself, near the entrance to the Yards, sells second-hand books, specialising in horror, science fiction and fantasy. But there are also comics (great covers from the 'Dracula' comic on the walls), graphic novels, children's books and classic literature. I bought this while I was there, as well as a great old copy of 'Gargantua and Pantagruel' to replace the one I've lost:
Michelle bought a nice edition of Hardy's shorter poems too. We thought about buying some of the fantastic, full-colour vintage horror movie pictures on sale -- they would make great presents -- but decided we'd better save some money and come back another time. And we will go back; second-hand bookshops are the only place for real booklovers to be, and they are quite a rarity these days, at least in our fair county. Use them, as the saying goes, or lose them.
