short hair, skinny,
he smokes a rollie
by a white van
on the corner
looks at me, passing,
calls me jesus,
and everyone
around him laughs
his eyes are glassy
like the surface
of a lake
before it snows.
envoi
my hair is long
my beard is thick
your waxy cropped
head makes me sick.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
OBAMA DRAWS A LINE UNDER TORTURE
Liberal commentators are expressing disappointment today about Barack Obama's announcement that he won't prosecute CIA operatives for torturing terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay and in other dens of American (and probably British) justice around the world. It is as if, for them, he's compromised himself fatally, becoming--as we all expected--a more articulate version of the Beast that came before him.
Well, that may or may not be so, just as Bush and Co. may or may not have been the Beast we assume them to have been. But as quick as I am to leap on Obama for failing to match deeds to the fine words (and how fine they were) that got him elected, I struggle to see how he could prosecute CIA operatives without prosecuting the lawyers and high-ranking government officials who approved the torture methods being used. That delightful man Dick Cheyney is on record as saying that water boarding is an acceptable method of interrogation in the extraordinary circumstances America faces as it struggles to defeat radical Islam.
"I was only acting on orders," of course, is not an adequate defence. But in Nazi Germany (not that I am drawing parallels between that and America post-9/11: even during the worst excesses of the Bush administration it was restrained by fundamental moral values, even if it showed an extraordinary capacity to rationalise their laying aside for the greater good), the soldier who attempted that defence saw every member of the Nazi high command tried, and the majority hanged.
Unless Obama is prepared to try Cheyney and Bush for war crimes, which he would never do, it would be utter hypocrisy to put those who followed the orders they gave on trial--even if we do have to question the nature of an agency whose fealty to international law is so slight that one call from an illegally elected president will see that law broken so grostesquely by its operatives.
Well, that may or may not be so, just as Bush and Co. may or may not have been the Beast we assume them to have been. But as quick as I am to leap on Obama for failing to match deeds to the fine words (and how fine they were) that got him elected, I struggle to see how he could prosecute CIA operatives without prosecuting the lawyers and high-ranking government officials who approved the torture methods being used. That delightful man Dick Cheyney is on record as saying that water boarding is an acceptable method of interrogation in the extraordinary circumstances America faces as it struggles to defeat radical Islam.
"I was only acting on orders," of course, is not an adequate defence. But in Nazi Germany (not that I am drawing parallels between that and America post-9/11: even during the worst excesses of the Bush administration it was restrained by fundamental moral values, even if it showed an extraordinary capacity to rationalise their laying aside for the greater good), the soldier who attempted that defence saw every member of the Nazi high command tried, and the majority hanged.
Unless Obama is prepared to try Cheyney and Bush for war crimes, which he would never do, it would be utter hypocrisy to put those who followed the orders they gave on trial--even if we do have to question the nature of an agency whose fealty to international law is so slight that one call from an illegally elected president will see that law broken so grostesquely by its operatives.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
splake and "The Winter Diary"
I received with today's bundle of bills and fliers from the local pizza houses my copy of t.kilgore splake's "The Winter Diary", which might best be described as his poetical autobiography. I've read it in draft but now here's the finished product, out in book form. It looks good. I wish the print could have been a little bigger but I guess that would have meant more pages and increased the cost of print and sale. And not everyone has the eyesight of a half-blind hamster like me (lol, as texters say).
I will do a proper review of the book when I've read it through again, but congratulations to splake for directing his considerable energies to the completion of the book; I know it's been a long time coming.
I will do a proper review of the book when I've read it through again, but congratulations to splake for directing his considerable energies to the completion of the book; I know it's been a long time coming.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
2009 Is Really Nothing Like The 80s
People keep pointing out the similarities between what's happening now, and the recession of the 80s.
They're right in one sense. It does look the same: all those abandoned shops, people crowded outside of Job Centres.
But in any substantial way it's completely different. Back then people were politicised, if they didn't have their snouts in Thatcher's trough.Every second person in the dole queue knew who had put them there and was intellectually engaged in how to change things. I know. I was in the dole queues with them. And the lucky ones who had jobs but weren't seduced by Thatcher's call to the baser side of their nature looked on with repugnance.
And the bands supported the people in the dole queues and in all the other places that the Hand of Greed was smashing culture and tradition. They showed leadership. They talked politics to NME hacks. Some even toured political shows to galvanise the anti-Thatcher vote.
There were vegetarian whole food shops run by anarchist students in every town. The Communists took caravans of people out to tie white doves on the fences at American air force bases.
Now the people on the street talk racism. Hate foreigners. Crowd in black trackies and stupid white baseball caps like Primark versions of the thugs in "Clockwork Orange" and swear and spit at anyone who looks different. Wish jail on the few who have the courage and intelligence to know what's really going on and want to protest against it.
Now football is the only thing the average kid gives a fuck about. Which is fine: I like football too. But unless my memory is failing me it seems like there used to be so much more.
The 80s were awful. The triumph of everything monstrous in human nature, and, I might add, the progenitor of the collapse we're living through now. But everybody who hadn't been bought off knew that and refused to take the side of the racist homophobic book-burning swine who ran the country.
These days it seems like almost everybody takes their side.
I am sure it won't be too long before the Government takes away our right to engage in political protest.
And when they do it the majority of people whose freedom is being destroyed won't even notice its passing.They'll be too busy reading TV gossip in gutter press Tory newspapers and thinking that the world's going to hell.
On that, if very little else, I can agree with them.
They're right in one sense. It does look the same: all those abandoned shops, people crowded outside of Job Centres.
But in any substantial way it's completely different. Back then people were politicised, if they didn't have their snouts in Thatcher's trough.Every second person in the dole queue knew who had put them there and was intellectually engaged in how to change things. I know. I was in the dole queues with them. And the lucky ones who had jobs but weren't seduced by Thatcher's call to the baser side of their nature looked on with repugnance.
And the bands supported the people in the dole queues and in all the other places that the Hand of Greed was smashing culture and tradition. They showed leadership. They talked politics to NME hacks. Some even toured political shows to galvanise the anti-Thatcher vote.
There were vegetarian whole food shops run by anarchist students in every town. The Communists took caravans of people out to tie white doves on the fences at American air force bases.
Now the people on the street talk racism. Hate foreigners. Crowd in black trackies and stupid white baseball caps like Primark versions of the thugs in "Clockwork Orange" and swear and spit at anyone who looks different. Wish jail on the few who have the courage and intelligence to know what's really going on and want to protest against it.
Now football is the only thing the average kid gives a fuck about. Which is fine: I like football too. But unless my memory is failing me it seems like there used to be so much more.
The 80s were awful. The triumph of everything monstrous in human nature, and, I might add, the progenitor of the collapse we're living through now. But everybody who hadn't been bought off knew that and refused to take the side of the racist homophobic book-burning swine who ran the country.
These days it seems like almost everybody takes their side.
I am sure it won't be too long before the Government takes away our right to engage in political protest.
And when they do it the majority of people whose freedom is being destroyed won't even notice its passing.They'll be too busy reading TV gossip in gutter press Tory newspapers and thinking that the world's going to hell.
On that, if very little else, I can agree with them.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Geoffrey Bellamy
(This journal entry from this morning was very difficult to write. But it felt good once I'd finished it, as if I'd brought something out into the open I'd been trampling down for too long. I reproduce it here not as a work of literature or some kind of failed attempt at prose poetry. It's just writing, free writing, first meant for what Ginsberg called my "soul's ear", now offered to my friends as some sort of partial explanation of my eccentricity, my anger, my anything that needs explaining. "This is the creature I am!" -- or at least some of him. I hope anyone bored enough to read it will forgive its imperfections and at least commend its honesty.)
While I progress slowly--and it must be slowly--through Blake I'm also reading the diaries of Harold Nicolson. He was the husband of Vita Sackville-West, you may remember. Nicolson's language is beautifully clear and precise. You'd never know he was a civil servant in those years of World War One and immediately afterwards, rather than a professional writer.
But his photograph on the cover of the book reminds me of Geoffrey Bellamy, my English teacher at Westfield, for some reason, despite the fact that they look nothing like each other. Mr Bellamy must have been in his late forties or his fifties when he sat in front of us. But that would have made him the survivor of another world, Nicolson's world, a long-gone world whose habits and customs he was trying to hold onto. His last great writer would have been Kingsley Amis, probably, who they called "angry" but whose writing now is redolent of an educated ruling class which has all but disappeared. No wonder old Geoffrey seemed so exasperated by tousle-haired, sloppily-dressed, irreverent scum like Hodder in the third row (who, funnily enough, fell in love with poetry when old men stopped trying to persuade him of its beauty and nobility, and now--occasionally--even gets a poem published here and there).
Mr. Bellamy once made me get down on my knees in front of him and the whole English class so he could demonstrate the correct way to tie a tie. Even then I thought that was abusive--deliberate humiliation--but what could I do once he had set himself on that course of action? I had no balls anyway thanks to all the bullying I was put through in the corridors (every day of every year for the five years I was there). And if I'd defied old Geoff he only would have misrepresented my behaviour, and his behaviour, and got me caned by somebody above him.
My career as a political outsider and a malcontent was probably decided the moment I got down on my knees in front of Mr Bellamy. And yet, he may not have meant to sour me forever to a vile system where power is abused by those who've stolen it, and all their friends will link arms with them and collude in any lie they tell so that the abused and dispossessed can never have a portion of that power.
Nicolson's diaries refer to the common custom of shooting deserters from the British Army in World War One. The England that Mr Bellamy had lived to see the passing of was a much tougher England than the one we live in now. The Establishment back then never doubted its divine right to sit on top of everybody else and smack down anyone whose conduct deviated from the norm. It was done for them. For England and for God.
Mr Bellamy might well have assumed, looking back as I am now, aged 44, that humiliating me a little would be morally improving. Help build a strength of character, or a proper sense of obedience to the rightful ways, that I wasn't getting from my parents (one of whom he knew, and must have considered a thoroughly bad example).
So thank you, Geoffrey, if you wanted to improve me by making me feel hot, embarrassed and ashamed in front of children who delighted in doing exactly the same to me every time your back was turned (and how often it was turned). They do say, after all, that it's the thought that counts.
But writing this thirty-odd years later, I still feel my heart pound and my head ache when I remember what you did. I wish you were around still so we could sit down and discuss it man to man, Old England; but to you that might be less appealing.
While I progress slowly--and it must be slowly--through Blake I'm also reading the diaries of Harold Nicolson. He was the husband of Vita Sackville-West, you may remember. Nicolson's language is beautifully clear and precise. You'd never know he was a civil servant in those years of World War One and immediately afterwards, rather than a professional writer.
But his photograph on the cover of the book reminds me of Geoffrey Bellamy, my English teacher at Westfield, for some reason, despite the fact that they look nothing like each other. Mr Bellamy must have been in his late forties or his fifties when he sat in front of us. But that would have made him the survivor of another world, Nicolson's world, a long-gone world whose habits and customs he was trying to hold onto. His last great writer would have been Kingsley Amis, probably, who they called "angry" but whose writing now is redolent of an educated ruling class which has all but disappeared. No wonder old Geoffrey seemed so exasperated by tousle-haired, sloppily-dressed, irreverent scum like Hodder in the third row (who, funnily enough, fell in love with poetry when old men stopped trying to persuade him of its beauty and nobility, and now--occasionally--even gets a poem published here and there).
Mr. Bellamy once made me get down on my knees in front of him and the whole English class so he could demonstrate the correct way to tie a tie. Even then I thought that was abusive--deliberate humiliation--but what could I do once he had set himself on that course of action? I had no balls anyway thanks to all the bullying I was put through in the corridors (every day of every year for the five years I was there). And if I'd defied old Geoff he only would have misrepresented my behaviour, and his behaviour, and got me caned by somebody above him.
My career as a political outsider and a malcontent was probably decided the moment I got down on my knees in front of Mr Bellamy. And yet, he may not have meant to sour me forever to a vile system where power is abused by those who've stolen it, and all their friends will link arms with them and collude in any lie they tell so that the abused and dispossessed can never have a portion of that power.
Nicolson's diaries refer to the common custom of shooting deserters from the British Army in World War One. The England that Mr Bellamy had lived to see the passing of was a much tougher England than the one we live in now. The Establishment back then never doubted its divine right to sit on top of everybody else and smack down anyone whose conduct deviated from the norm. It was done for them. For England and for God.
Mr Bellamy might well have assumed, looking back as I am now, aged 44, that humiliating me a little would be morally improving. Help build a strength of character, or a proper sense of obedience to the rightful ways, that I wasn't getting from my parents (one of whom he knew, and must have considered a thoroughly bad example).
So thank you, Geoffrey, if you wanted to improve me by making me feel hot, embarrassed and ashamed in front of children who delighted in doing exactly the same to me every time your back was turned (and how often it was turned). They do say, after all, that it's the thought that counts.
But writing this thirty-odd years later, I still feel my heart pound and my head ache when I remember what you did. I wish you were around still so we could sit down and discuss it man to man, Old England; but to you that might be less appealing.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Give Life A Chance
A friend of mine has been depressed again recently. Very depressed. To the extent that she has had the old thoughts about suicide returning for the first time in a while. And when I talked to her about it the other day I found myself in the uncharacteristic position of being the one defending life. Arguing for its virtues. Protesting that some good will come if she can only wait. I felt like Michael Landon in "Highway to Heaven".
But I have come to believe it, after all my battles with depression, all my loneliness, all those things that went wrong, all the mistakes I have made. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I believe it presently. Who knows where I am going to be or what condition I'll be in six months down the road?
The last year has been hard. I was living somewhere I didn't want to be, without even a tv or a telephone to connect me to the outside world, I was getting more ill by the month (or so it seemed), and depression had begun to consume me so thoroughly I was finding it harder and harder to talk even to strangers, much less develop tentative friendships into real ones.
But all that has turned around. Well, not all of it. I'm still dealing with these seizures. But a new home was offered to me for less money than I was paying on the flat, part furnished and in town, and many people surprised me by coming forward and helping me to move at negligible cost. The kindness that I was showered with humbled me completely.
New friendships flowered. Old friendships returned. And before long I found I was waking up in the morning in a pretty good mood for the first time in months. Not exactly looking forward to my day, because I am not good in the mornings and until I have woken up properly nothing looks right, even joy. But I believed that something positive might conceivably happen in amongst all the usual bullshit.
I know it could all disappear once again. That I could find myself, someday soon, back in a hell like the one I've just left. But my point is that I got out at all. I escaped it. And I'm not even sure I did anything to make that happen. And if I am back in that hell one day I will be able to look back on the moments I'm living through now and have something it is worth my remembering.
So give life a chance, that's my message to my friend, and anybody else reading this who might be doubting whether it's worth getting up in the morning. Yes it can royally suck sometimes. But just when you are convinced that it has nothing left to give you it might pull a new lover or a new home or a beautiful sunrise out of its sleeve. And when life does that, it does it with a style nobody else can muster.
But I have come to believe it, after all my battles with depression, all my loneliness, all those things that went wrong, all the mistakes I have made. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I believe it presently. Who knows where I am going to be or what condition I'll be in six months down the road?
The last year has been hard. I was living somewhere I didn't want to be, without even a tv or a telephone to connect me to the outside world, I was getting more ill by the month (or so it seemed), and depression had begun to consume me so thoroughly I was finding it harder and harder to talk even to strangers, much less develop tentative friendships into real ones.
But all that has turned around. Well, not all of it. I'm still dealing with these seizures. But a new home was offered to me for less money than I was paying on the flat, part furnished and in town, and many people surprised me by coming forward and helping me to move at negligible cost. The kindness that I was showered with humbled me completely.
New friendships flowered. Old friendships returned. And before long I found I was waking up in the morning in a pretty good mood for the first time in months. Not exactly looking forward to my day, because I am not good in the mornings and until I have woken up properly nothing looks right, even joy. But I believed that something positive might conceivably happen in amongst all the usual bullshit.
I know it could all disappear once again. That I could find myself, someday soon, back in a hell like the one I've just left. But my point is that I got out at all. I escaped it. And I'm not even sure I did anything to make that happen. And if I am back in that hell one day I will be able to look back on the moments I'm living through now and have something it is worth my remembering.
So give life a chance, that's my message to my friend, and anybody else reading this who might be doubting whether it's worth getting up in the morning. Yes it can royally suck sometimes. But just when you are convinced that it has nothing left to give you it might pull a new lover or a new home or a beautiful sunrise out of its sleeve. And when life does that, it does it with a style nobody else can muster.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
BEATNIK resuming business--submissions welcome
It's about time I started doing some work on that damn magazine/ blog/ blogazine/ magablog--whatever the hell it is--now that I've moved house and only have a few boxes left for Sonia to burn before I can say I've really settled in (she likes setting fire to things). So why don't you send something to me at bruce.hodder@hotmail.co.uk and we'll try to fit it in there.
We've already published some fantastic contemporary poets and writers--JD Nelson, Yvon Cormier, Gerald Nicosia--so your stuff doesn't have to be Beat-themed. Actually, it can be whatever you want, even opinion pieces or a great story about your weekend, as long as it's good writing, at least insofar as I'm able to judge what good writing is--which may or may not be that far. But that's the risk you take with any editor, bunch of tinpot little dictators that we are.
I'm going to shut up now. If you want to have a look at the page first it's at whollycommunion.blogspot.com.
**********
Can I add under this post, which also appeared at another site, that if there are any people out there thinking I'm a rude bastard because I haven't answered their emails recently I plan to do so in the next week? What with my house move and all that involves, as well as struggles with illness just lately, I've let a lot of business slide that I should have kept on top of. But unless my relative alertness and energy at the moment is a precursor to the final curtain being drawn (recent events have made me profoundly superstitious), I should be able to climb to the top of the neglected business pile pretty soon...
We've already published some fantastic contemporary poets and writers--JD Nelson, Yvon Cormier, Gerald Nicosia--so your stuff doesn't have to be Beat-themed. Actually, it can be whatever you want, even opinion pieces or a great story about your weekend, as long as it's good writing, at least insofar as I'm able to judge what good writing is--which may or may not be that far. But that's the risk you take with any editor, bunch of tinpot little dictators that we are.
I'm going to shut up now. If you want to have a look at the page first it's at whollycommunion.blogspot.com.
**********
Can I add under this post, which also appeared at another site, that if there are any people out there thinking I'm a rude bastard because I haven't answered their emails recently I plan to do so in the next week? What with my house move and all that involves, as well as struggles with illness just lately, I've let a lot of business slide that I should have kept on top of. But unless my relative alertness and energy at the moment is a precursor to the final curtain being drawn (recent events have made me profoundly superstitious), I should be able to climb to the top of the neglected business pile pretty soon...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
free writing: NEXT TIME
a blackbird lands on my garden fence
above where strings of prayer flags
are flapping in the morning wind.
it looks me in the eye a moment
through the gap between drawn curtains.
next time it might be a horse, a man,
and who knows what i'll be,
though something--i'm not ready yet
for the great launch into empty sky.
i blink. the blackbird disappears.
goodbye birdie, and fare well.
i hope those prayers the wind set free
help you find a longer, sweeter life.
now i'm off to the benjo
with a book about tibet.
above where strings of prayer flags
are flapping in the morning wind.
it looks me in the eye a moment
through the gap between drawn curtains.
next time it might be a horse, a man,
and who knows what i'll be,
though something--i'm not ready yet
for the great launch into empty sky.
i blink. the blackbird disappears.
goodbye birdie, and fare well.
i hope those prayers the wind set free
help you find a longer, sweeter life.
now i'm off to the benjo
with a book about tibet.
STOP PRESS! ANTI-WAR LONG-HAIR SAYS LAY OFF THE SOLDIERS, EH?
It's no secret that I was against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I'm not sure what the British and American governments think they're achieving in Afghanistan either. But abusing returning British soldiers as people did in Luton yesterday is ridiculous, and actually, it brings the anti-war cause into disrepute with the larger population.
The soldiers went to Iraq because they were TOLD to go to Iraq. They are in Afghanistan because that's where their orders have sent them. And although there is suffering and abuse and violation of international convention on both sides, they're having a pretty awful time while they're over there. And I would imagine a good many of them believe they're experiencing and inflicting the horrors of war in the name of a righteous cause. For Britain. For democracy.
In other words, for the continuation and health of pretty much the same ideals those of us in the anti-war movement go on marches and write crap nobody reads on Facebook. The British and American soldiers are not our enemies. They have been put into a situation we deplore BY our enemies--that is, obviously, politicians and the vested interests that motivate and manipulate them--and as a consequence their lives, if they get to keep them, will be changed forever.
Leave them alone, I say to Islamic activists and the dumber people on the fringes of the anti-war movement, and direct your ire against the people who really deserve it.
The soldiers went to Iraq because they were TOLD to go to Iraq. They are in Afghanistan because that's where their orders have sent them. And although there is suffering and abuse and violation of international convention on both sides, they're having a pretty awful time while they're over there. And I would imagine a good many of them believe they're experiencing and inflicting the horrors of war in the name of a righteous cause. For Britain. For democracy.
In other words, for the continuation and health of pretty much the same ideals those of us in the anti-war movement go on marches and write crap nobody reads on Facebook. The British and American soldiers are not our enemies. They have been put into a situation we deplore BY our enemies--that is, obviously, politicians and the vested interests that motivate and manipulate them--and as a consequence their lives, if they get to keep them, will be changed forever.
Leave them alone, I say to Islamic activists and the dumber people on the fringes of the anti-war movement, and direct your ire against the people who really deserve it.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
talking to l.s. drinking stella artois
work your magic,
my poor, green, giving,
temperamental beauty,
until the world has ceased to be.
and then i'll sleep
clean through, and
undisturbed by dreams;
and wake up in the morning
fresh, as all drinkers
at your long neck do,
sure for once
a cruel universe
is giving me a chance.
my poor, green, giving,
temperamental beauty,
until the world has ceased to be.
and then i'll sleep
clean through, and
undisturbed by dreams;
and wake up in the morning
fresh, as all drinkers
at your long neck do,
sure for once
a cruel universe
is giving me a chance.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Rockin In The Free World
Hazel Blears has been going around saying we should have the courage to stand up, despite "political correctness gone mad" (the mantra of frustrated right wing lunatics everywhere), and stand up for values we hold dear. Okay Neil you start.
Poverty and inequality seem to be two of the most popular ones with either Labour or Tory governments.
Oh, and what's this shit about emboldening ourselves to tell Muslims that homophobia and misogyny are against our core values? Islam would love the attitude of at least half the British population towards gays and women. It tends to be we maligned liberals and leftists and anarchists and hippies and whatever you call those kids with dreads who want to free everybody.
Poverty and inequality seem to be two of the most popular ones with either Labour or Tory governments.
Oh, and what's this shit about emboldening ourselves to tell Muslims that homophobia and misogyny are against our core values? Islam would love the attitude of at least half the British population towards gays and women. It tends to be we maligned liberals and leftists and anarchists and hippies and whatever you call those kids with dreads who want to free everybody.
Monday, February 23, 2009
I'm So Glad I'm Moving I Could Almost Pop
You're supposed to have ambivalent feelings when you move house. You know, when you pack away your possessions (which people think of as their life), and see the house or flat in which there has been so much love and laughter now empty, and needing a hoover.
Not me. I can't wait to move into the new house in Northampton. Not only for all the well-rehearsed reasons about how much more convenient it will be living in town etc etc. But also because, much as I hate to say it, I haven't been happy at the flat in Earls Barton. Not at all, in the whole of the two years I've been there.
Which is not to say I haven't been happy in two years, don't get me wrong. But all of my good times have happened in other places, at other people's homes, or in pubs, or even (again, it's a rather guilty confession), at work, where--despite the stresses any job brings--I've had some great laughs and wonderful conversations and met a few people who I hope will be friends for the rest of my life.
But Earls Barton sucked. Well, the flat sucked. I had no phone line, which they didn't tell me when I moved in, and when I asked for one they said I could have it installed if I payed half. The TV didn't have a proper signal and when I asked them to fix that they told ME to go to the local repair man. Who himself told ME how to fix it and said he was too busy to do it himself.
Then they rented out the space underneath my flat and put a shop in there. I told them, reluctantly, that it would be okay because I didn't think I had a choice. And then I had nowhere to put my bin. I asked the estate agent for a solution and all they did was ignore me. So I put the bin in various places and three times it was stolen. Finally I did a deal with the woman who ran the post office--a fierce but kindly old girl--who let me use the space just outside the post office in the alley as long as she could share it.
And the flat had no heating of its own. Just two free standing radiators that couldn't warm your ass if you sat on top of them. And the flat had its shower in one of the bedrooms which left mould growing on the ceilings and one of the walls. And the bathroom was wallpapered and the paper began to peel the first time I used it and continued to peel fror the entirety of my stay. And the kitchen door they promised to put on was never put on. And twice during my tenure there the landlady put the fucking rent up!
You might ask why I didn't move, if things were so bad. A good question.Well, if I could have moved I would. But moving when you rent is horrendously expensive and I didn't have the money to stump up for a deposit, one month's rent in advance and the handling fee or whatever it is the estate agent charges to process the contracts . If I hadn't been offered the use of my old manager's house (there go my radical credentials) I might have still been there in Earls Barton living in the nineteenth century wondering when the landlady was going to decide to up the rent again.
So no, no ambivalent feelings about moving. Hell, I even started having goddamn seizures while I was there. When the woman who had the shop beneath brought in a medium and the medium said the whole building was possessed by a malevolent spirit I could well believe it.
Except that bad spirit may have been the ghost of laissez-faire fuck-your-neighbour 1980s capitalism.
Onward. And upward!
Not me. I can't wait to move into the new house in Northampton. Not only for all the well-rehearsed reasons about how much more convenient it will be living in town etc etc. But also because, much as I hate to say it, I haven't been happy at the flat in Earls Barton. Not at all, in the whole of the two years I've been there.
Which is not to say I haven't been happy in two years, don't get me wrong. But all of my good times have happened in other places, at other people's homes, or in pubs, or even (again, it's a rather guilty confession), at work, where--despite the stresses any job brings--I've had some great laughs and wonderful conversations and met a few people who I hope will be friends for the rest of my life.
But Earls Barton sucked. Well, the flat sucked. I had no phone line, which they didn't tell me when I moved in, and when I asked for one they said I could have it installed if I payed half. The TV didn't have a proper signal and when I asked them to fix that they told ME to go to the local repair man. Who himself told ME how to fix it and said he was too busy to do it himself.
Then they rented out the space underneath my flat and put a shop in there. I told them, reluctantly, that it would be okay because I didn't think I had a choice. And then I had nowhere to put my bin. I asked the estate agent for a solution and all they did was ignore me. So I put the bin in various places and three times it was stolen. Finally I did a deal with the woman who ran the post office--a fierce but kindly old girl--who let me use the space just outside the post office in the alley as long as she could share it.
And the flat had no heating of its own. Just two free standing radiators that couldn't warm your ass if you sat on top of them. And the flat had its shower in one of the bedrooms which left mould growing on the ceilings and one of the walls. And the bathroom was wallpapered and the paper began to peel the first time I used it and continued to peel fror the entirety of my stay. And the kitchen door they promised to put on was never put on. And twice during my tenure there the landlady put the fucking rent up!
You might ask why I didn't move, if things were so bad. A good question.Well, if I could have moved I would. But moving when you rent is horrendously expensive and I didn't have the money to stump up for a deposit, one month's rent in advance and the handling fee or whatever it is the estate agent charges to process the contracts . If I hadn't been offered the use of my old manager's house (there go my radical credentials) I might have still been there in Earls Barton living in the nineteenth century wondering when the landlady was going to decide to up the rent again.
So no, no ambivalent feelings about moving. Hell, I even started having goddamn seizures while I was there. When the woman who had the shop beneath brought in a medium and the medium said the whole building was possessed by a malevolent spirit I could well believe it.
Except that bad spirit may have been the ghost of laissez-faire fuck-your-neighbour 1980s capitalism.
Onward. And upward!
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