Cinematic Sibilance

I've watched two films this week: Atonement (at the cinema) and The Seventh Seal (a reviewing on DVD after seeing it first about 20 years ago).

I think Atonement is probably the best film I've seen this year. I came away from the cinema feeling sad and reflective, while at the same time excited by what I had just seen, in the sense of being reminded how art can sometimes penetrate your mind deeply and trigger all sorts of thoughts and associations, such that you feel enlivened and invigorated. Atonement impressed in a number of ways: the acting was uniformly excellent; the design and cinematography was exquisite (from the bright, sunlit colours and shadowy, light-shot interiors of the country house to the desaturated hues of wartime France and London); the use of music, patterned on the repeated clack of manual typewriter keys; and the technical skill on display (witness the much-commented upon continuous tracking shot of the troop-strewn beach at Dunkirk).

It was the denouement of the film that I was thinking about most as I walked back to my car with the cool night moisture collecting on my cinema-warmed temples. Out of the swirl of visual beauty, narrative and the layered, integrated music, emerged an overall sense of sadness, beauty and bleakness; bleakness because, firstly, there's no happy ending for anyone in this film, and, secondly, because the author's attempt at atonement and making peace with her past is wholly inadequate in the face of the effects of her behaviour. Further, the author's admission of invention throws into doubt everything about the preceding narrative - how much of it is true? how much of it do you want to be true? - and makes me conclude that there is no redemption, no way of back-tracking on the paths taken and the choices made; there's just cause and effect coupled with randomness, and the narratives we invent/re-invent to make sense of what happens to us.

After the naturalistic perfection of Atonement, The Seventh Seal could be argued to look a bit creaky, both at the technical level (the stuffed hawk swaying unconvincingly in the breeze in the prelude) and in terms of some of the acting, which has elements both of theatricality and hammy comedy, and which, in a world seen through irony-tinted spectacles, can seem to grate with the film's more serious concerns. But the power of the film to engage the intellect and the emotions is undimmed: the knight's struggle for meaning after his loss of religious faith - given the apparent absence and silence of God - still resonates today in a world of moral relativism and uncertainty, while the terror and hollowness of organised medieval religion is powerfully conveyed in the procession of flagellants and priests, and in the burning of the supposed witch. The game of chess with Death facilitates the knight's realisation of meaning within a humanist (rather than strictly religious) context, and holds out the hope of meaning and fulfilment in a world that is devoid both of spirituality and justice. In this sense, it feels to me as if this film has more of a warm heartbeat of hope than the more intellectually arid Atonement. You might argue that I am deluded in looking to find meaning in a meaningless world, rather than accepting the premise that the only meaning derives from the individual consciousness and the order that it seeks to impose on the world. And I'd listen to that argument very sympathetically, still not wanting it to be true.

Today, I bought a compilation DVD of Shaun the Sheep by way of contrast. Note that, spookily, the 'SS' in this title matches the 'SS' in the Bergman film: I will study Shaun's activities closely for any signs of apocalyptic iconography and spiritual angst.

Natural History Museum, Oxford. Monday. Cretaceous period

Link

Memories/Memoir and/as Therapy

I’ve been reading Jonathan Franzen’s "The Discomfort Zone". It’s primarily a memoir of his childhood and adolescence, his relationship with his mother when she was terminally ill, with the sale of the former family home after her death as the initial point of departure. As almost always happens when I’m reading other people’s memoirs about their childhood, I
find myself recalling little scenes or sense memories from my own past, and these ripple and echo and repeat, firing and refiring the neural connections that have been stimulated so many times before: reinforcement, reinforcement, reinforcement…

Similarly, I could reflect that these ‘automatic’ recollections of these familiar images and feelings (the things that I like to recall, and to wallow in) are analogous with the repeated responses and behaviours that are firmly embedded in my unconscious repertoire, in my psychology, in the physical substrate on which those psychological structures have been built;
in my way of thinking about myself (and my self), my attitudes, the way that I ‘am’ in the world.

And it might be more important to reflect that it’s not these familiar, often-looked-at images that I need to re-examine again if I am going to change my course (or at least vary the range of experiences that I open myself up to – habit, damnit): on either side of each familiar image, and above and below them, there are darker, less visited places; the places where you don’t want to shine the light because the things there are too difficult and frightening; the underlying/embedded structures of your life and behaviour that you skirt around/ignore through habit or by (conscious or unconscious) design. These places might be illuminated by a few simple questions or observations from those people that know you and love you best, or by you posing those questions to yourself. However, because you’re a bit sensitive and difficult and cowardly and habitually evasive and in denial, you don’t ask those questions – not really – and you tend to steer clear of people and situations that might throw you, that might force you to confront these weaknesses or difficulties; the things that might expose you or make you vulnerable; and you only allow people who ‘respect your space’ (physical and psychological) to get close(ish) to you – the people who won’t ruffle your feathers, who won’t press you too hard about what’s really going on with you and your life, who will (with the best intentions and respect for you as an autonomous individual) help you to carry on being who you are and behaving in the way in which you’ve become accustomed to behaving (i.e. in a way that protects and perpetuates this established, habituated self/persona).

And thus you remain in this emotional/behavioural holding pattern, repeating what you have done before, revisiting the places and people and states that bring you solace, and continuing not to find things beyond the familiar and comforting, things beyond what you have already known and experienced, sometimes rationalising this as a way of maintaining your current state of stability/happiness/contentment, while simultaneously knowing that there is something different underneath these professions of objective rational analyses.

[too private]

And these repeated patterns become fossilised, atrophied, stuck. It occurred to me that it might be interesting (and potentially useful) for me to track back to my own childhood, adolescence and adulthood in order to deconstruct/reconstruct some of the formative experiences, sensations, images, relationships and stories: the habits, conflicts, addictions, patterns of thought, affectations, camouflages, screens and maladaptive behaviours (and patterns of thought). To uncover and illuminate for myself those darker corners beyond the things that are now so over-familiar as to have become transparent.

Next: I am born

I love...

......this tree. It does this every year, beautifully.

Vapour trails

I love what air and water can do.

What the expletive is going on?

Every TV and radio news bulletin, plus the BBC News website, has, as their main story, the news that Prince William and his girlfriend are splitting up.

WHAAAAAAT?

Clearly somebody has redefined the meaning of 'news' while I had my back turned. Sometimes I despair about my country and its culture.

Yes, it has.

Been a while, that is. Not sure why. Secretiveness? Laziness? Wariness? Mm.

Anyway. It struck me that all the news reports I heard (on UK TV/radio) about the bombing inside the Iraqi parliament talked about how the blast had killed 'three MPs and five others'.

Look at that bit in inverted commas.

The implicit assumption is that the people from the political class are more important than anyone else - that their existence is privileged over 'other', more ordinary people.

If ever there was an indictment of the war's privileging of political desire over humanism, those headlines are it.

also

I've got a lovely early morning picture of sky and vapour trails (from my camera phone), but Flickr seems to have become Fuckr, and no longer accepts my MMS submissions. Arsing annoying.

Also also

Saw "Days of Glory" (aka "Indigenes") last night: very impressive and thought provoking. Glib review to follow...

Thomas and Denis in the Field

I strain to lift my backside off the ground and the weight on my shifts a little, so I settle back down onto the ground and push at the rags with my hands.

The rags are slippery wet, with something spongy inside them, but I get some purchase on them and they start sliding down my legs, the backs of which are aching with the effort and the use of unaccustomed muscles. I manage to get my knees up a bit, and give the rags an extra hard shove with my hands: my right palm goes through the gap between two folded edges, and my hand goes up to the wrist into something soft and gooey that feels like thick, warm engine grease. It feels horrible, and I jerk my hand back out, instinctively shaking it to get the gooey stuff off it. I feel some of the stuff spatter on my cheek and forehead. The weight’s off me, and I wriggle through the mud past the rags and out into the fresh air. I look down at my hand and it’s stained with red and brownish green slime: bringing it up to my face I can smell the iron smell of blood and a smell like shit.

There’s a mist of blood and muck sprayed across the snow and mud and up the back of the tank.

“Tommy.”

The rags and weight are his legs: I can see the nail heads in the soles of his boots gleaming whitely in the snow-reflected light. There’s bone and reddish-purple [?] flesh showing at the torn ends of his overalls, and bits of muck and skin in the snow and mud.

The shelling has all stopped, and the cold, snowy wind sound is audible again, brushing across the delicate surfaces of my ears. My cheeks feel very hot, and I’m dizzy. The air is swirling past me, and I’m swaying.

I lift my head up and turn around, looking back towards the road. There are some dark shapes on the snow within ten yards of me, but I don’t want to see them, so I look at the road in the middle distance. The second half-track has been hit; smoke is boiling off the burning engine compartment and the wood and canvas, and there are flames flickering underneath the chassis. There’s debris and dark shapes on the road.

There are a couple of men moving across the field towards me, but they’re blurry and they waver as I look. I shut my eyes and sit down in the wet snow.

When I open my eyes again the men are nearer, and I can see that it’s Albert and Franz from my crew. They’re carrying blankets. They crouch down beside me and put a blanket over my shoulders and one over my legs. They’re saying things, but my head is swimming and I can’t concentrate on the noise they’re making, and I just hear a gargling swirl, like the last water draining out of a bath.

I just nod to them. I’m all right. I’m not hurt.

I shut my eyes again and feel Franz and Albert’s masses move away from me. The sky wavers and sways.

They’re putting blankets over things.

Tommy resting the nape of his neck on the seatback as our truck raced along a dust-parched road during the exhilarating summer offensive in [France…]

They’re putting blankets over the dark shapes.

Twisted snakes and chunks of meat.

Thomas wrinkling his nose and screwing up his face as the man in the bar was sick, sick, sick with the striptease girls’ lights shining through it.

The stump of his spine sticking out of the meat of his [hips and thighs], and the gaping red-orange and black cavern of his viscera-emptied [ribcage], with the sheared-off ends of the ribs all white, like the nuggets of bone in a pork chop [a spare rib chop, in fact].
Helping Thomas walk home from the Henkel Works’ Christmas party, that first winter they’d worked there during their apprenticeship; Thomas had had too much to drink and was within one more word of getting into a fight with the older man who had danced with Thomas’ girl, and who had ended up with her on his arm later in the evening. Thomas’ legs working away automatically like a puppet’s while Denis had his fingers around the back of Thomas’ neck, half-holding him up and half-guiding him towards home.

Thomas’ dark hair flittering in the breeze, brushing against the powdery snow. One eye open and still, the other lost in a mess of blood and torn flesh where head has been sliced in two diagonally and the jaw, cheek, teeth and gums have been smashed and shredded, mangled into pulp and ribbons of flesh and skin and seared into a half-burned mask of hideous intricacy.

Thomas’ mother putting a coffee cup down on the unfamiliar dark wood nightstand next to the bed in the spare bedroom. The rain-filtered daylight breaking into the room when she draws back the curtain: illuminating the steam rising from the coffee a foot from his face and shining through the stretched fabric of her blouse where she’s reaching up to the curtain, so that, just for a moment, he can see her arm in dark silhouette, the white gauzey space under her arm, and the start of the shape of her breast.

He’s in the back of one of the half-tracks, stretched out across the bench seat, propped up with a rolled tarpaulin that someone has stuck down in the footwell. He’s cold. The sound of the engine, the rolling rhythm of the tracks and the thick, oily smell of the [doped/treated?] tarpaulin is making him feel sick. He shuts his eyes.

When he opens them again, it’s darker. He can see the sky through the crenellated cut-out shape of the half-track’s body [the metal pressing?]: there’s dark snow cloud blowing in, below whiter, higher cloud and the glimpses of blue beyond the white. The half-track has stopped, and the engine is stopped. He can smell cigarette smoke nearby, and he thinks he hears the sound of someone moaning or being sick. He’s cold, and the smell of the tarpaulin is rich in his nostrils; he can feel a growing soreness there where the chemicals are irritating the soft membranes.

I wonder what they have done with Tommy? Poor Tommy.

Denis: his aside about memory…{placement?}

It’s funny how I can remember so much from that time, and yet I can barely remember what I did yesterday. Whenever I watch a detective thing on the TV and the police officers ask somebody what they were doing on a particular day six months ago, I realise how far-fetched these whole things are, they way that they always ask the same questions. It’s not like real life.

I can remember things best from when I was a boy – less than ten – and then again when I was a young man, starting to go to work, from fourteen [?] to eighteen. And then some things from the war, and the early times with Julianne, and when we lived in the attic rooms after we got married. There’s lots of things from there that are very clear and fresh for me.

But then there are whole stretches of time when it’s all grey and blurred together, when nothing stands out. Things from the clearer times come back when I smell a smell or see a colour, of hear a sound or a piece of music maybe. And if one little memory starts off, sometimes a whole stream of others will follow straight along with it, like a line of dominoes all falling down when you click the first one over. That’s nice. Sometimes it happens at night, when Julianne is asleep and there’s just me awake, with the green light from the electric clock-radio glowing on the wallpaper by my bedside table, and the old alarm clock with the metal bells on top ticking away on the chest of drawers by the window. All it might take is for the edge of the eiderdown or the scratchy woollen blanket to tickle my cheek in a particular way when I pull it up to cover myself, and in my head I’ll be back in my childhood bed or lying next to Julianne or out in the field somewhere in my army days.

Sometimes it will happen that I’ll start thinking about the old days and I will just keep thinking about things and they’ll be going round and round in my head, and then I’ll get that horrible feeling when I know that I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep for ages, so I’ll stop trying and get out of bed and go downstairs and make myself a cup of hot chocolate and sit in the kitchen, on the high stool, facing the wall and listening to radio, turned down very low so that it won’t wake Julianne or Jos and [daughter’s name], so low that most of the time I can’t even hear the words that the presenter is saying between the music. But you have to have it low, otherwise the music blares out. (Years ago, there wasn’t even any music on the proper radio in the small hours – all the radio programmes closed down, and all you could hear if you listened in the dark was hissing and whistling and pops and crackles, and, if you were lucky, you might catch the sound of some foreign station for a while, and try and make out what someone was saying in English, or French, or Russian, or maybe even Chinese or whatnot. Nowadays there are all sorts of different stations on at night, but none of them ever seem to play the kind of music that our generation like; things with proper tunes and words that you can hear, and not all sung by singers who sound like they’re trying to sound like an American. The music’s all sex now, for the young people.)

It’s good when we go to a wedding and meet up with the old families – mine and Julianne’s. More likely it will be a funeral now, though. All those people that we grew up with…nearly all of our aunts and uncles have gone now. We’ve seen them when we were children, all smart in their suits that they only wore twice a year, the men with their hair all oiled down, and the women with earrings shaped like the middle of fried eggs (but a different colour) and pearls around their necks. And we’ve seen them get older and disappear…some in the war, when the city was bombed, others moved away for jobs, some we just drifted away from and didn’t get to see for years and then we heard that they were dead and it was too late, and we’d worry about whether we should go to the funeral as we hadn’t seen them or even sent a Christmas card for years, but in the end we’d usually go and there would be the old faces, with whiter hair or no hair, and grown fatter or all gaunt, and the older ones bent over or deaf, with the brown spots creeping down the skin on the back of their hands that was thin and greasy so that you could see the tendons through it, and the veins all ridged and blue. But even the youngsters – the dead one’s children – would be pleased to see you always, and after the funeral you’d all get together at the house or at the church hall or the Soldier’s Union, and after the sandwiches and the pies and a couple of drinks, people would start to reminisce about the dead one and the old stories would come out and people would start to get over their sadness a bit and start to laugh, which seemed wrong at first, but gradually the laughter would seem all right, and the talk and the food and the laughter would all seem to be more about the people who were left, and not about the dead one (though you’d mention their name in the story you were telling, and everyone in your little circle near the bar would stop talking and look down at the floor for a little while, and then someone would say, “Ah well,” and you’d go on.

And it was at these get-togethers that you could start talking about some little thing that you remembered from the old days – a certain shop, or a relative who died long ago, or a place that you all used to go to on a charabanc trip one day in the summer when all the factories were shut for the holiday week – and that one little thing would remind you of something else, and that would jog someone else’s memory, and all these “yes, and what about…” and “I remember that!” memories would all merge into each other and you’d all end up wiping your eyes with laughter, remembering all that shared history and the all the lost colours and places and friends that you’d known. All those things that you wouldn't have been able to remember on your own, as if they only exist when all of you are trying to think about them at once.

And at the end of the evening, when you’d been to the toilet for the last time so that you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable on the bus home, you’d step out of the warmth of the hall and into the night (usually it would have been raining, and the air would be starting to get colder), and the smell of the men’s beer and the ladies’ face powder and eau de cologne would be on your face and clothes from the round of kisses and handshakes that you’d made just before you left. Just you and your wife, facing the journey home in the dark, in the city that now belonged to younger, ruder, noisier people, and as you walked down the tarmac path between the wet bushes and down to the road, leaving behind the glow of your shared memories and the yellow electric lights, you’d pull you coats closed and take each other’s hands for comfort and security as the cars sloosh past on the hard black tarmac and the shouts of yobboes echo around the streets.

Denis and Thomas

Thomas leads me right around to the far end of the bar and through a door into another room, where there are more seats, but where it’s quieter and darker: the ceiling lights are all turned off, and the tables and chairs are only illuminated by the light spilling from the bar; beyond the bright bar lights and the scurrying figures of the barmaids I can see the throng of men that we’ve just passed through. On this side of the bar, there are just a couple of young women in dark coats, talking to each other at the bar, drinking little glasses of green drink that looks thick and sweet with the light shining through it. They look over at Thomas and me, but barely seem to see us, and they turn back to each other and carry on talking in voices that are too quiet to hear.

Thomas climbs up on one of the fat [banquettes?] that line the walls and pulls on a cord to turn on one of the wall lights. Then he moves around the room collecting all of the cardboard beer mats, eventually coming back with a stack about a foot high. He spills them out on the table and sits down before leaning across the table towards me. His eye sockets fall into shadows like a picture of a skull. He whispers, “Those are the lady dancers,” and nods a slow, exaggerated nod.

Most of the beer mats are distorted and corrugated like the furrows in a picture of a ploughed field. When we play trying to stack them up in colour-coded piles, they fall over when the pile reaches three or four mats in height. It’s frustrating. Next we try and make a kind of house of cards, but the edges of the mats are too buckled and irregular, so we start trying to spin them across the table to each other and catch them. We don’t say much.

The fat barman comes into the room and talks to the lady dancers; all three of them leave by a dark wooden door that’s in shadow at the end of the bar.

Thomas says, “Come on, they’ll start in a minute. Let’s watch.”

I nod, wondering how he knows so much about what goes on in this grown-up place, and feeling jealous because I know so little about anything outside of my mama and pappi and my story books. I want to be Thomas’ friend so that I can learn about the grown-up things without having to be with grown-ups and getting laughed at.

The lights in the main bar go off as we try and make our way through the crowd in the other bar. Blue and red lights are shining above the curtains above the little stage, and these and the lights and mirrors reflecting behind the bar create a funny atmosphere, like Christmas lights or a fairy grotto, glinting on beer glasses and men’s teeth and eyes, painting little bits of the darkened world in unusual colours and casting strange shadows.

The men are gradually moving towards the stage end of the bar, and some are climbing up on stools or chairs so that they can get above the rest of the crowd. The crush is too solid for Thomas and I to get through (and it’s a bit scary down here in the dark at our low level, with the men all moving carelessly), so we move to the wall where the windows are and climb up onto one of the well-padded [banquettes?]; from here, we can see, now and again, between the constantly moving silhouettes of the grown-ups’ heads and shoulders, the top third of the curtains and the lights above. There’s a spotlight shining on the curtains, and they now have a rich, bright blue look, the colour of a kingfisher in my story book. The men are talking loudly and laughing, and when they turn their heads sideways to talk to each other we can see their mouths open and close in silhouette and their heads nod up and down.

A burst of applause, whistling and shouting as the curtains open, something joyous and animal about the sound, and it fades down and there’s somebody playing the piano [need to establish its placement earlier…], a bouncy, comical rhythm that makes me think of a camel trying to walk downstairs with big slippers on. The roaring men quieten down, but there’s still a background noise of whistling and isolated shouts and laughs that go along with the piano.
The music changes to something a bit slower, with long repeated phrases that have a lazier, swinging rhythm, like the rhythm of girls twirling a skipping rope in the street. Every now and again the men cheer. Sometimes we see one of the dancing lady’s dark-haired heads moving, spotlit, across the space between the men’s silhouettes, or her white hands in the air above the men’s heads. The lady’s hands and arms look pale, pasty white.

Thomas shakes my shoulder and points towards the bar; one of the men has peeled off from the back of the crowd and is bent over with his hands above his head on the edge of the bar. His back is heaving and hollowing, and slivers of light sparkle and glisten on the strings of stuff that are pouring out his mouth onto the shadow-hidden floor.

Denis and Tommy in the field

Tommy’s swearing as we run, and I’m laughing with the gulping, breathless excitement of the [adrenalin rush] and his characteristic string of profanities, the standard sing-song rhythms of his conversation: “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit…” Then he must trip, because I hear his sudden intake of breath and the thump as the hits the ground. I stop and look around, and there he is, scrabbling his way to his feet amid the mud and snow, swiping the snow off his face. “Don’t stop!” he shouts, “keep fucking running!” I laugh and do as he says.

When I reach the disabled tank, I half-stumble, half-dive under the Leopard’s big exhaust pipes and into the dark space underneath the hull. Another shell explodes behind us, much closer, and I feel the blast’s pressure wave and hear the earth and snow and stones pinging against metal. Tommy’s weight thuds in against the back of my legs and I lie panting, face down in the dirt and snow, smelling metal and burned paint and ash and wet earth. The backs of my legs are wet. There’s cool bluish snow-reflected light in the spaces between the [road wheels].

“Christ, Tommy, that was close. Another five seconds and I reckon that one would have had us.”
Tommy doesn’t say anything, and I jerk my legs to get him to move off them; “Shift, Tommy – you’re squashing me.”

Shells are still exploding, but they’re getting further away now. The one by the tank must have fallen short: it’s the road that they’re ranging on.

Tommy just lays there, though. I think I can feel him shaking.

I kick out again. “Come on, Tommy, don’t piss about – get the fuck off me.” After the exhilaration of the running and the near-miss, I’m excited and [a bit manic, unconstrained], and I laugh as I twist myself around so I can push him off.

It’s not Tommy that’s resting on me, I realise: it’s a dark bundle of something whose shape I can’t make out in the semi-dark. The field outside is bright with sunlight that’s breaking between the thin clouds, and the whiteness is dazzling/confusing my vision and the contrasts here in this shadowed space. Maybe it’s a tarpaulin or something that’s blown off the back of the tank. Which means that Tommy must still be outside, I realise… “Tommy? Tommy?” I shout, and just hear the wind whispering across the snowfield and the stubble. I struggle to get up, desperate to get outside and see what’s happened.

I’m leaning back now, as there’s not enough clearance under the hull to sit up straight [true? Check ground clearance…], and the bundle’s weight is on me legs up as far as the thighs.

Denis and Thomas

Behind the curtains, the little stage is lit by streaks of light and the reflected pallor of the yellowed ceiling. The other boy pulls the curtains together, and immediately it feels quieter, cut off and private, despite the heave and hum of the drunk men in the bar. Thomas sits down on a fold-up wooden chair; there are others stacked at the back of the stage, as well as a couple of tall stools and a low [chest/ottoman].

“I’m Thomas,” says the boy, “what’s your name?”

“Denis.”

“Is your daddy here?” asks Thomas.

“Yes, he’s here talking to his friends from the tram garage.”

Thomas splutters with laughter.

“ ‘Talking to his friends’, eh? Never heard it called that before!”

I laugh too, not wanting to be left out or to let him see that I don’t know what he means.

Thomas says, “My daddy’s here, too. He’s always here. He just comes here to get pissed,” and he pulls a face, twisting his mouth and looking at the floor.

The sound of the swear word is exciting; I know that adults are allowed to swear, but it’s not something that children are allowed to do in our house. Whenever I’m walking past a group of rough children in the street with mama, she always looks away from them and makes me hold her hand, putting herself between me and them, as if she doesn’t want me to be contaminated; she says that they’re ‘common’ and ‘grubby’ and ‘dirty talkers’. Thomas seems a different kind of boy, though: he’s quite smartly dressed, and his hair is combed over and oiled. The way he uses the swear word – just as description, and not as a way to annoy or upset someone – makes him seem less of a child, and more a part of the grown-up world where these kind of words are part of normal conversation, and not the taboo rarities that mama makes them out to be. Although Thomas looks as if he’s younger than me, he’s already at an advantage, with a kind of adult authority over me.

He swings his feet backwards and forwards under the chair a couple of times, then cocks his head on one side and says, “Would you like to play something?”

When I nod, he gets up and pulls one of the heavy curtains aside, letting the bar light flicker in.

“Come on, then – we can’t stay up here. The lady dancers will be starting soon, I should think.” He speaks with such authority that I’m compelled to follow him, content to wait for the meaning of what he’s saying to become clear. When I climb down from the stage he’s already disappearing into the throng at the bar, the light shining on his oily hair as he insinuates his narrow little body into the gaps between the men’s legs. I hurry, not wanting to be left behind.

Thomas and Denis in the field

Metal and wood scrape together heavily as the crew deploy the [towing ramps] across the verge and the ditch at the field’s edge. Each Leopard weighs over fifty tons, and we’ll need to make a separate trip for each tank if we can’t repair them in situ. We have to hook up the three [Bison/s] with towing rods and combine their pulling power to tow the loaded trailer. We’ll use the combined power of the three winches to drag each tank across the field to the road.

We start back towards the road to help the chaps get things ready. We’ve walked fifty yards before we hear the sudden sound overhead, like a rush of wind, falling in frequency, and then a column of earth fountains up from the edge of the field, twenty yards from the first Bison. The sound of the artillery shell’s detonation cracks and echoes across the field, and Tommy says, “Shitting fuck. Shit, shit, shit.”

He grabs my arm and we turn and run back towards the Leopard to take cover underneath its armoured bulk. The snow and churned earth make it hard to run properly.

More shells come in quick succession, whooshing over our heads and exploding behind us near the road. The third explosion brings the thunk and screech of tearing metal, and someone screams.

Tommy’s swearing as we run, and I’m laughing with the gulping, breathless excitement of the [adrenalin rush] and his characteristic string of profanities, the standard sing-song rhythms of his conversation: “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit…”

I half-stumble, half-dive under the Leopard’s big exhaust pipes and into the dark space underneath the hull. Another shell explodes behind us, much closer, and I feel the blast’s pressure wave and hear the earth and snow and stones pinging against metal. Tommy’s weight thuds in against the back of my legs and I lie panting, face down in the dirt and snow, smelling metal and burned paint and ash and wet earth. The backs of my legs are wet.

“Christ, Tommy, that was close.”

Shells are still exploding, but they’re getting further away now. The one by the tank must have fallen short: it’s the road that they’re ranging on.

Tommy doesn’t say anything, and I jerk my legs to get him to move off them; “Shift, Tommy – you’re squashing me.”

He just lays there, though.

Cacktopia - 1. The opening

She's convinced that everyone's life has an arc, like a line on a graph. Most of the time, when you're in the midst of your life, you might have a sense of the ups and downs of the day, the week, the month, the year. But it's only with distance, with the perspective of the years, that you can see the shape of the arc; and the whole arc can only be plotted when you are dead.

But here she is, still not quite believing that her life could have taken the turn that it has.

Denis: Thomas’ Bloody Death

(…to the soundtrack of Vaughan Williams’ Phantasy Quintet and Yes’ “The Gates of Delerium”?)

Whenever we went to recover vehicles that had been disabled in combat, we couldn’t resist trying to reconstruct the circumstances of the fighting that had taken place. When our convoy of recovery trucks, cranes and trailers slithered to a halt at the edge of the snowy field that morning after a slippery drive along the slush-smeared, pot-holed roads, the woods flanking the field were still burning, a pall of sweet smoke drifting across the road on the edge of the breeze, grey and wispy against the washed-out blue winter sky. There were remnants of orange flame amongst the blown grey ash and the blackened trees, and when the truck engines were cut we could hear the sound of burning wood spitting and crackling.

The two Leopards were in good recovery positions, a hundred yards apart and facing the enemy lines, turrets turned to the baling out position. One of the tanks was a little nose down, with the front half tipped up into a [hollow], but it didn’t look as if we’d have too much difficulty attaching the tow cables and winching them up onto the trailers.

Thomas and I walked carefully across the field towards the tanks, our boots crunching through the top layer of snow and into the melted layer of slush underneath; underneath that was the melt-softened earth and the stiff fibres of the crop stubble left behind after the harvest. Although we knew that the enemy had been driven back from their positions in the trees at the high end of the field, it was hard not to keep looking up there to check that there were no silhouettes of soldiers or tanks or artillery pieces. There were a number of parallel gouges in the snow that lead up to the tree line, torn-up earth and snow and crop remnants from where the remaining tanks in the troop had continued their advance on the enemy positions. There were small patches of disturbed earth where anti-tank or mortar shells had hit the ground.

It was more raw out in the middle of the field, where the breeze travelled unhindered, and I could feel the inside of my mouth getting colder as I breathed in the chilly air. Thomas stopped to light a cigarette, turning his back to the draft and hunching his body around the lighter flame until his cigarette took, and I saw the smoke sweep around the shoulder of his black overalls, which looked inkily dark and monotone against the dazzling white of the snow. After being in barracks for a few days while the snow and fog had curtailed the fighting, I’d half-forgotten that strange snow effect, whereby the snow’s brightness and lack of contrast makes the light flicker in your eyes, and you feel disoriented and anxious because it seems, just for a moment, as if you can’t focus on anything or see any edges or shapes, and you have to look up at the sky or the horizon to restore your sense of perspective and balance.

As we reach the nearest Leopard, we can see that the right-hand track has been thrown, spooling out twenty feet in front of the tank. There’s a smoky smear above the main driving wheel, presumably where the anti-tank shell hit. Around at the front, it looks as if another shell hit the driver’s vision port: the horizontal slit of glass is shattered, and there’s ash and melted rubber and leather spilled out around the driver’s hatch on the decking above. Up close, the chemical-rich smell of these burned materials is obvious in the winter air. There are blackish bloodstains on the decking too. This happened late yesterday afternoon.

“The anti-tankers must have been over in the woods,” says Thomas, nodding in the direction of the smoking trees. “Bloody lucky shot to hit the vision port dead on.”

“And bloody bad luck for the driver,” I say.

“Poor bastard.” He pulls hard on the cigarette while I do a circuit of the tank, checking that all of the tow-hooks are [unencumbered] and that there’s nothing else to complicate the recovery. As I walk around behind the rear of the tank, planting my footsteps carefully in the churned-up earth, I can see the rest of the recovery crew standing on the trailer at the edge of the field. I wave and give them the thumbs up, and the drivers restart the truck engines so that they can manoeuvre the winches and trailers into position.

Thomas is crouched down by the right driving wheel, poking around with the big screwdriver that he always carries around with him. I stand a little way off, and when I hear him grunt as he straightens up, I say:
“Our fighter-bombers must have fire-bombed the woods, I’d say.”

“Mm,” says Thomas. “The [Ivans] must have got the hell kicked out of them after that. Look at all the crows flitting about in that treeline – they’re not going to be hungry for the next few days.”

I smile and nod. Metal and wood scrape together heavily as the crew deploy the [towing ramps] across the verge and the ditch at the field’s edge.

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Denis at the door

Luckily, someone inside the door starts pulling on it. The hinges squeak and the bottom of the door grates on something and gets stuck, so the person inside shoves the door towards me and then tries again, with the same result. I hear the man inside muttering and huffing, and he kicks at the bottom of the door and then tries pushing and pulling it some more. I look over my shoulder, expecting the boys to be almost upon me, but I’m surprised to see that they have changed their minds and are walking away from me again, back towards the streetlamp.

The man inside stops battering away at the door, and, through the gap at the edge of the door, I can hear him breathing heavily. I knock on the door with my knuckles to let him know that I am here and so that he won’t be angry with me when he eventually gets the door open [just in case he thinks that it was something that I had done that had made the door jam].

“Who the fucking hell is that?” he shouts, “What are you fucking doing out there? Get this fucking door open!”

“I can’t,” I say, “I haven’t done anything, sir.”

He’s silent for a moment, then I hear him muttering, “A kid, a fucking kid. For Christ’s sake.”

He grunts, like a fat man bending over to tie up his bootlace, and I hear a scraping sound, and then he kicks the door a couple more times and it swings towards me and slams against the frame, then the man opens it fully so that he can come outside. I step back, but as he passes me (smelling of beer and onions and hot fat) he tries to clip me around the side of the head and says, “Get out of the fucking way, you little bastard. Little bastard,” and he waves his hand at me. “Fuck off out of the way. Fuck off,” he says to himself more quietly, and then he laughs.

I stand in the doorway, watching him lurch off, swaying from side to side, off towards the main street.

When I push the inner door open, the atmosphere of the bar is completely different from when pappi sent me to wait outside [bugger, I’d forgotten that he said he’d be ‘out in a minute’ – need to cover that off while he’s waiting outside: annoyance, fear, frustration, impotence]. The air is sickeningly thick with cigarette and pipe smoke, and the sound of the men’s voices all talking and laughing at once is a confused, frightening roar that sweeps around my head and makes me frown and blink.

It’s almost completely dark down at my head level, and when I move in among the drinkers I have to step carefully over the beer-slick floor, gently feeling my way with my fingertips against the rough trousers and jackets of the men, who [lurch] aside at my touch, and by the time I reach the part of the bar where I’d last seen pappi, my head and shoulders have been splashed with cold beer and sprinkled with ash.

Pappi has moved, but there’s a stool free where he was standing, so I use its [footrests] as a ladder and climb up so that I can try and look around and find him. The smoke is so thick that I can hardly see the other end of the bar, but I do recognise the fat man who walked me here; he’s sitting on a stool with his elbows on the bar, and between his elbows there’s a small glass with a clear liquid in it. His eyes are open, but his top eyelids keep drooping slowly down, and his head tips forward in dozy synchrony. When the lids close fully, his chin hits his chest and he jerks his head back up, eyes fully open again. The men standing around him are shouting and waving their hands around, jogging him periodically, but he looks completely oblivious to it all.

Somebody prods me in the side, where the softest skin is, under the bottom rib, and I twist around, expecting to see pappi. Instead, I find myself having to look down at the face of a boy about the same age as me. He’s got a purplish-red birthmark that sweeps down from his forehead, all across one eye, and halfway down his cheek. He smiles up at me, and his teeth on the birthmark side of his face look white against the skin there.

He says something, but I can’t hear him because of the noise and heat [earlier…the heat…]. I shout, “What?” but he shakes his head and turns away, cocking his head to indicate that I should go with him. When he reaches the curtained-off [stage], he parts the curtains and clambers up before looking back at me with his head between the curtains and raising his eyebrows. ‘Come on!’ he mouths.

Denis outside the bar

Outside, the day is tipping over into evening; the sky between the buildings, overcast all day, is flattened into a uniform grey. The building frontages have lost all possibility of detailed contrast now that the invisible sun has dipped below the taller [city financial district] buildings to the West. Already there’s a faint damp, smoky smell in the air as the temperature starts to dip.

Up the street, the huddles of men with their cigarettes have gone, but there are boys there now, boys my age and older, kicking a heavy, half-inflated leather football across the street and back again. Now and again the ball hits the kerb and leaps high into the air, and while it’s up there in the air I am suspended/stilled with anticipation, waiting to see if the ball will hit a door or a window: at home, boys who play with footballs in the street are inevitably chased off by an irate adult as soon as the ball bashes against someone’s wall or wooden door; broken glass elicits an even higher degree of anger, with slaps and bunches administered if the culprit is apprehended by the red-faced householder. The bruised, snivelling miscreant then has their name and address bullied out of them and is escorted home, where their parents will administer a second round of corporal punishment, never even trying to elicit the child’s side of the story.

Here, though, the boys don’t seem concerned about the possibility of property damage or resultant adult intervention. They laughed loudly and swore at each other, and once in a while the biggest boy would grip one of the others in a headlock and rub his knuckles in the smaller boy’s eyes or ears. I hung back as far as I could against the outside wall of the bar, in the lee of one of the window frames, because I knew that I didn’t want the big boys to see me and see that I was a stranger here. I would have stood in the recessed doorway, but there seemed to be an increasing traffic of overalled or donkey-jacketed [?] men coming into the bar as the afternoon faded and the lamplighter started his work on the main street at the end of the side road.

Soon, it would be getting fully dark, and the lit lamps already had their dusty haloes of smoke and light. It starts to drizzle, and the pavements and building frontages take on the same oily grey aspect. There’s a glow of yellow light from above the bar’s curtained windows, but I’m standing in a shadowed pool of gloom. I button up my jacket and wish that I had a cap, but have to make do with turning up my collar and wrapping my arms around myself. The next time someone enters the bar, a great rush of laughter surfs out on the splash of light that glitters for a moment on the paving stones, and then the warmth and light of inside the bar is cut off as the door swings shut. The hollow thud of the football on the roadway is more intermittent now, and the boys’ voices echo between the buildings; some of the boys have left, leaving bigger spaces between the shouts and the talk.

Eventually the lamplighter passes by the front of the bar his [technical name of the lighting pole thingy] slanted on his shoulder like a rifle [check how this worked]. He sees me huddled against the wall in the dark and stops.

“Hello, son,” he says, holding the [lighting thing] up so that it lights up my face, “all on your own? ’Spose your daddy’s inside, is he?”

I nod, biting the inside of my bottom lip.

“Shall I light up the lamp for you?”

I shake my head, trying to push my back further into the brick wall, and think about the big boys down the street and how the lamplighter will be attracting their attention.

“No, thank you,” I say, “it’s all right, thank you.”

“Suit yourself, son,” he says, annoyed, and heads off the street towards the footballers. He lights the lamp closest to the boys, and the four remaining boys move into the pallid arc of its flickering light, where the white drizzle drifts. The lamplighter walks on, then stops and turns back towards the boys: I can see his lips moving, but I’m too far away to hear what he says. When he’s finished, he laughs, and the four boys all turn around and look back towards the bar, and towards me.

As they start walking towards me, I feel my heart sinking, and I want pappi and I want to go home and I want be in the warmth and familiarity of our home, with mama at the sink and pappi at the table with his evening paper and his sausages and onions on his dinner plate. I want to be able to look at their absent faces as they talk to each other, not looking at me, and I want to be able to lay my head down on my arm stretched out across the table and look at mama sideways as I sink into an end-of-the-day drowsiness.

[…?]

The door to the bar feels heavier than earlier, and I can only get it open a few inches before it jams; I strain and pull and push, but it won’t open far enough for me to get through and into the bar, where pappi will look after me (if I can find him). The four boys are twenty yards away. With the chill [??] and the fear and frustration and the effort of trying to get the door open and knowing that it’s unfair and that I can’t escape, I know that I will start to wet myself in a minute.

Denis Again Again

“Denis! Oi, Denis!” – it’s pappi’s voice, but I have to wait until he shouts again before I can find out the direction that his voice came from. But there he is, off to the left, around by the wall where the bar curves inwards towards a door next to the bottles. I find my way around the legs of the men, which make me think of the forest of tree trunks I’ve seen in one of the pictures in my story book. These tree trunks sway and smell, though, and the wooden floor is slippery with spilled beer, and it smells too – the whole place smells of sour beer and cigarettes and dust and fried onions. [care re: sensory/atmospheric similarity to Jan’s barrack drinking den…] Looking up form time to time, I see men tipping back glasses, and the white foam floating on the top of the amber liquid that’s shot through with the whitish light from the window. There are flushed faces and sweaty faces, faces set with stupid grins and faces animated with laughter, bright eyes and fishy-looking eyes, and cigarettes and pipes and bread rolls with meat and onions in them. Nearly everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.

Pappi is leaning on the little folding hatch in the bar, and as I come up to him he has to step aside and let a little man with a twisted, smiling face lift the hatch and come out into the body of the bar. He’s got a cloth folded over his arm, and he nods exaggeratedly at everyone who catches his eye.

“Aye aye, Denis!” says Pappi, and he reaches down and lifts me up, then plonks half of my bottom down on one of the high stools, and I have to grab his arm to prevent myself falling sideways as he lets me go.

“Don’t fuss, son, don’t fuss,” he says, irritation thickening his already drink-thickened voice. I notice that his cheeks are brick red.

“I’m not,” I say, “You didn’t put me on the seat properly.”

“Oo-ooo!” says one of the men pappi is standing with, “He’s a fighter, is he, your Denis?”

Pappi sort of smiles, but not a happy smile, and brushes my hand away and steps back. I can see I’ve made him look silly, and that he’ll be angry with me when we get home. It feels as if all of my body is draining out through my bottom, and I want to sigh and cry.

Pappi looks at me, pretending that he’s not annoyed, and he says, “So, Denis, what have you been up to while I’ve been talking with the boys?”

“Nothing,” I say, looking past his ear, and thinking about the picture of the naked lady in my pocket and the way that I’d jumped all over the tram seats and run around and tried to get into the driver’s cabin. [make sure he did this too – the shiny metal and the mechanisms; precursors of his apprenticeship and his technical aptitude] Pappi says something else, but I’m still staring past his ear, at the smoke-blotched plaster ceiling, and at the ruffled tops of some dusty blue curtains that cordon off the corner of the bar. There’s a gap where the two curtains almost meet, and in the gap a bright white light is being turned on and off, on and off. One of the curtains is brushed against from the other side, and a man on that side of the curtain says, “That’s fine,” and the light goes off and stays off. There’s the sound of a chair scraping on a wooden floor.

“Oi!” says pappi, “if you’re not going to listen to me I’m not going to talk to you. You might as well sling your hook.”

I stick out my bottom lip and look at him. The bar is full of men talking and laughing, and I hear a hollow rush of air and the sound of the street for a moment as someone opens the door and comes in.

Pappi says, “Look…” and fishes in his pocket for a couple of coins, which he gives to me, “go and wait outside. I’ll be out in a while and we’ll go home. All right?”

I nod mutely.

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Denis Again

The rain has stopped and the sky has cleared a little while I have been playing around on the trams inside the depot, and the crowds on the street is thinner now that the morning has passed. There are more women and girls on the street now, and fewer men in dark clothes and overalls. Young women seem to be gathered in little groups on the street corners, smoking cigarettes and laughing with their mouths wide open, showing their teeth and their pink tongues. Mummy would say that they were ‘common’, and that we ‘should take no notice of them – it will only encourage them if we look’. So I look at the pavement as the fat man holds my shoulder and steers me along the street. But it’s hard to look away when the fat man shouts, “Afternoon, girls!” to one of the groups as we pass, and they all laugh (everyone seems to think that he is funny, except for me). I raise my eyes and risk a look at the girls. Up close, they don’t look as young as their clothes, seen from a distance, would suggest, and some of them are very thin and unhealthy-looking, with shadows like bruises underneath their eyes, and bangles on their wrists that rattle and make their bony wrists look even thinner than they actually are. All of the women have red lips and rouged cheeks, and most of them have thick black stuff on their eyelashes, and some of them look a bit like they’ve been crying.

We cross the road, but stay on the wide main street, where the buildings are tall and dark, the brickwork and windows all stained with rain and smoke and muck. There are no shops or stalls on the ground floors: instead, there are railings that guard the fronts of the buildings, and steps up to double front doors, and steps with gates at the top that lead down into rubbish-strewn [basement thingies – what are they called?]. The ground floor windows are all tall and [curtained] with lace [? Equiv. of modern ‘nets’] curtains, but, higher up, you can look in between the metal bars and see patches of ceilings and sometimes shelves and boxes.

We walk about half a mile, and the fat man hums to himself. I suddenly think that pappi doesn’t know where I am, and that I don’t know who this man is, or where I am. I look up at him sideways and see his fat throat wobbling with each step that we take; the filled skin swells out from his collar, and I can see that he needs a shave, because there are little blonde whiskers catching the light on the curves of his throat. He looks dirty to me.

I say, “Where are we? Is it far now?”

“Nearly there now,” he says, without looking at me. He tightens his grip on my shoulder and gives it a little shake.

A minute later, we turn into a narrower side street, where there are closed up market stalls on wheels parked in the kerb, and lots of men standing smoking cigarettes in doorways. It’s much darker down this street, and it’s almost as if you’ve suddenly stepped into a different city. The fat man feels me slow down and says, “Come on, son – nearly there,” and he gets hold of the shoulder of my jacket and gives it a jerk. He pulls me to a stop by a couple wooden benches up against a wall and says, “Here. Here’s where your pappi will be.”

I look up and see that there’s a door, with big windows each side. The windows are frosted glass two thirds of the way up, and clear at the top, where I can see some red curtains pulled aside. The door is of stained wood, almost black with scratches and soaked-up rainwater, and the glass in its centre is half hidden by a nailed on piece of plywood. The visible glass is cracked and has tape on it.

The fat man steps in front of me and pushes the door open, steps half inside and then looks down at me and says, “Come on, then – here’s your pappi.” When he smiles I can see the black stumps of some of his teeth, and spit glistening in there too.

It’s gloomy inside the bar, except for a space above the men’s heads, where a layer of cigarette smoke is moving in the whitish light that comes in through the clear tops of the windows. There’s a lot of dark brown wood, and some high stools at the bar, and the glitter and sheen of bottles and glasses behind the bar, where a fat man in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up is moving backwards and forwards, serving foam-topped beer to the men who are leaning against the metal rail that runs around the curve of the bar. The barman has the same hairstyle as my escort, and is equally fat, and I look at each of them in succession, and then back again. It makes me want to laugh, to think that these two might be brothers.

Milk and Static - 2

I'm a bit obsessed with recalling and recording the past at the moment, especially the time when I was on the cusp of adolescence. Another of my current manias is to think about my life in terms of the music that I associate with specific periods, events and moods. It's a bit of a nostalgia thingy, but I think I'm trying to capture as much of it as I can before age, distance, time and alcohol finally wipe my synapses clean of the ability to recall anything from more than thirty seconds earlier...

Not all of the milkmen were as affable and likeable as Martin. Thinking about it, this is not really a surprise: the demographic of that profession was predominantly white, working class, and aged 25-45 (or so), and a lot of them, I suspect, were just doing this job until something else came along. Back then, I had the idea that being a milkman was something of a vocation - that you signed up to be a milkman for life, and grew old doing it; I had seen older men on the floats, usually bespectacled, with that greased and combed-over-flat hair that only men in the mists of middle age sported. Out of that demographic, there must have been plenty who liked the idea of finishing by lunchtime, maybe spending some time in the pub or the betting shop, or in more shady pursuits.

Anyway, I worked for a number of them, and Martin was the only one who I liked. The others were a mix of the distasteful, the actively nasty, and the incompetent. The distasteful one was called Lawrence, I think: a little dark-haired guy with glossy black eyes and centre-parted hair; he wore his white milkman's jacket buttoned up, and it always seemed too tight, even on his little torso. He had quite a high voice, and a gurgly giggle, and he had a special 'mockery' voice that he used to laugh at us milkboys, at stupid motorists, and at customers who had displeased him or messed him around with their money on 'collection day' - this voice was gurgly, like his laugh, but it also had elements that referred to mentally ill and disabled people - usually this voice sounded like "oggle oggle oogle", and would be accompanied with a lot of eye rolling and tongue waggling.

It's a bit odd to think back now to how widespread and acceptable this mockery of the mentally ill and disabled was back in the early 70s - how integral it was to the culture that I grew up in. I remember that I embraced it fully in my innocence, along with the casual, widespread and deep-seated racism that was also thick in the air. My mum tells me that I came home from the milk round one day and said that "They [the ethnic minorities who lived in the tower block at the end of our road] should all be bricked up in there with their gold top milk". This from an 11- or 12-year-old boy in an overwhelmingly white, working class neighbourhood. I can only assume that I was repeating prejudices and terms of abuse that I had heard the milkman say - I know that I said it in a way that echoed the authoritativeness of a knowing adult who had the weight of experience and belief behind their utterance.

I still find it hard to accept that, even in a culture where racial stereotyping and racist abuse were acceptable, even on mainstream TV, I could think these things, even at the most superficial level of aping an adult's speech or beliefs. But I know that I did say it, and that it must have drawn on some embedded beliefs about the 'alienness' of these groups; what's most troubling is that this utterance implies that I was echoing the kind of 'exterminatory' language that the Nazis employed to demonise and marginalise the Jews and other 'undesirable' groups. This is troubling because it indicates how easily, how surreptitiously, these kind of messages can be imbibed by children as they're growing up - imbibed from adults, from their peers, from the images and words on TV, in the papers, in comics.

Obviously, I want to believe that there was some innocent little me at the centre of this, and that I didn't really say - and certainly that I wasn't responsible for it. And I do think that that's true: that I didn't make a moral choice about saying this thing; it was something that I picked up, that was 'programmed' into me. It was only later (around 1975-6, when I was 13-14) that I learned about the Holocaust, and watched "Roots" on the TV, that I began to see my attitudes 'from the outside', and was able to make some kind of moral judgement about them. I guess that was when I began to be a 'moral' being, and to step outside of the unquestioning, programmed, stimulus-and-response basis of my beliefs and behaviours. I suppose this happens to different people at different times, and that there are layers and layers of 'automatic' behaviours and beliefs that have been laid down like rock strata in the first few years of life, some of which you do become conscious of, and which you can examine critically, and others that are so deeply embedded that you can never escape them: the things that are so intricately wired in to your brain and body that you can never fully escape them.

There's a 'cyclical' element to this as well, I think: it seems to me that I moved beyond being a mere automaton in the mid-70s, when I discovered that the truths and shibboleths of my existence could be questioned, deconstructed, and remade. Thus I gradually constructed/evolved a new worldview, one composed of a secular humanism (if that's not a tautology...), empathy, relativism, tolerance, a romanticised socialism, bits of Marxist analysis, an innocent belief in altruism and the perfectibility of man, and an optimistic view of human nature and of eternal progress towards a more enlightened world. I can see now that this worldview was, in a way, just as artificial and 'context- and culture-bound' as my earlier unenlightened beliefs - in the sense that the late 70s (for me) embodied an upward arc of progress and enlightenment, dominated (at first, anyway) by leftist Labour governments that (so I perceived) were dedicated to the welfare state, to redistribution, to equality, and to the kind of grooviness that I wanted to see. Hence Thatcherism and the 'death of socialism' were a shock to me, and my socialist worldview was eventually smashed to pieces by the fall of the Soviet Union and the 'New Labouring' of the old Labour party; the beliefs that I had built up, and which occupied me for so long that they had become almost wholly habitual, were destroyed, and I had to realise that they I now had to reexamine them and rejig my moral universe. (Which I guess I'm still working on at some subconscious level...)

So, anyway, there were some milkmen that I wasn't keen on... (This started out as just another blob of nostalgia, and seems to have gone somewhere very different instead. Oh well. Back to simple sensory recollections...)

Static and Milk (1)

I'm not sure how I first started doing milk deliveries as my Saturday job, but I suspect that I got the gig through Stephen H, who was already 'on the milk'. The more I think about it, the more certain that that's right, because my first milk round memory is standing in the H family's dimly-lit kitchen in the pre-dawn dark while Stephen made us instant coffee in those mandatorially heavy-bottomed 70s mugs; I seem to remember that I found this rather sophisticated and adult, because at our house only the grown ups were allowed to use the kettle, and my little brother and I only got hot drinks when we were given them - we never asked for them ourselves. (This was all a part of the well-learned deference and quiet politeness that would stand me in good stead later when I denied myself any offered treats or pleasures lest I draw attention to myself or be thought a 'fat little pig'. This was part of a subtle process of learning that I did not deserve to have much, and that it was rude to ask, let alone take or accept.)

At one point, Stephen rummaged in a drawer for a spoon or a screwdriver or something and, not finding it, he opened the bottom drawer of the kitchen stack and poked around amongst the diverse objects in the gloom down there: these were precisely the same things that we had in our bottom kitchen drawer - balls of string, pot lids for pots that we didn't have any more, a couple of bicycle tyre levers, a rolling pin with one of its handles missing, and a sweet musty smell composed of dust, plasticine, decaying rubber bands, a greasy pack of cards and some stick-thin candles for birthday cakes. The radio was on, low, and Kerry Jubey was introducing early 70s pop records in his unplaceable accent. [Capital Radio, I guess it must have been...] The medium wave wavered and crackled a bit, but back then we had no conception of 'clean' digital sound, or even of FM as yet; radios had medium and long wave, and maybe a glamourous short wave band if you were lucky - my granddad had the first radio I saw with both SW and FM, and I used to fiddle around with the controls of this exotic beast without switching it on, imagining all the foreign voices that I would be able to listen to if only I had the courage to plug it in and switch it on. (In that upstairs room at nan and granddad's there was also a 'boxed' record player with a folding lid, and a musical box that hesitantly played its tinkling tune if you wound it up with the creaking, strained-feeling key/clockwork mechanism). That room smelt of the stuff that nan and granddad rubbed on their arms and legs for their aches and pains...like coal tar soap or Wintergreen's liniment (?).

It was during one of these early morning waits for the milk float to arrive that Stephen told me about the book he was reading: The Lord of the Rings. It's difficult now to untangle all of the later associations I have from reading the book myself (and from the Peter Jackson film trilogy), but what I think I remember is my response to the name 'Bilbo Baggins' - it sounded childish and ridiculous. This put me off reading the book, and it was only when my older brother's big fat single volume edition caught my attention a couple of years later that I actually got past that ridiculousness and read the book from cover to cover during a summer holiday stint in a commercial laundry.

When we step outside the house, on our way up to meet the milkman at the White Hart roundabout, it's cold, and I envy Stephen his woollen gloves with the fingers cut off just below the second knuckle. I'm quiet that first morning, nervous about meeting the milkman, and uncertain about what doing a milk round actually consists of: I was always a worrier, even at that age, thinking about what could go wrong and how I might end up making a fool of myself and looking stupid. Sometimes, later, this would become paralysing and isolating, and a barrier to experience and enjoyment.

We stand on the pavement on the Radcliffe Way side of the roundabout, waiting for the dim lights of the electric milk float to approach. I remember the quiet and the darkness, the amber streetlamps and their hazy discs of light, and the stillness of the deep, dark sky over the empty dual carriageway and the surrounding estates. The lights up on the balconies and walkways of the flats were cold and white. I was glad of my parka and, in later weeks, I would look forward to getting into the open-sided cab of the float and imagining that it was actually warmer in there than it was outside: in fact, the fibre glass moulding of the cab was cold and cheerless, but at least there was the light from the instrument dials and the purr off the three wheels on the damp raod surface.

There were other mornings, later in the year, when we would do the round in shorts and tee-shirts, when the birds would be singing as the sun rose, when there were no other cars on the road, and when I was aware for the first time of my starting its adolescent changes: I was a skinny thing then, and I was highly conscious of the knotty hair that was sprouting under my arms, and I had a favourite cap tee-shirt, dark blue and tight, that felt tight under the arms and made me feel somehow muscled and attractive. I started to think of myself as a little man, who might develop to be like a grown up. I imagined that girls and women would find something attractive about those hairy tufts squeezing out of my ultra-short shirt sleeves. I would brace my arms so that the upper arms were always held a little way away from my body. I'm sure that tee-shirt must have smelled divine after four hours of work in the Saturday summer morning sun (deoderant? not for me - that was the pungent stuff [Brut, probably] that people like my dad and his football crowd mates wore - too much offensively noxious attention-seeking).

I think that first milkman's name was Martin: in my memory, he's a narrower and far less obnoxious version of Rory McGrath, with his tight, dark curly hair, Peter Sutcliffe-type beard, and a Terry-Thomas-like gap in his front teeth that gave him a slight lisp, especially when he said 'pints' - which of course he did, often: "Two pintsth,", "Three pintsth". He would always draw out this word humorously, as if it had some elongated comedy meaning redolent of something more than these mere pint bottles of milk. He was humorous, but in a way that made you feel like you were his equal - not like some of the other milkmen, who were sour, sarcastic and snide. Martin made the round a pleasure, and we laughed a lot.

CH³CH²OH - Part 3

So. I'm 11 or 12, I guess, making the transition between 'junior' and 'senior' school: when I was a kid, you were in the 'infants' school from 5-7 (ish), juniors from 8-11, and senior school from 12-16 (or 18 if you stayed on and did A-levels); I grew up with the idea that people who 'stayed on' were a bit 'poncey' or 'up themselves'. Neither of those phrases existed in those days, of course - but it was clear to me that these stayers on were different from the kind of people that we were, even though my older brother had won a kind of scholarship to a school that was totally outside my family's experience - a boarding school; you can't imagine how exotic this was in the place where I grew up. I remember being very proud about it for reasons that aren't all that clear to me now - although I think that they were to do with pride in my brother's achievement (he was a role model for me, especially after we became a 'one parent family) and my sense that my family was somehow different from the rest of the people in our street. I suppose that there was some kind of snobbery at work here (for no reason), and perhaps an early sign of the intellectual arrogance that would afflict me in later years, but I guess the root was in my sense that I thought I knew better than most of the people I was around, even though I was shy and quiet and couldn't demonstrate my (felt, but unspoken, and almost unconscious) superiority.

So many of the other boys in my street/neighbourhood demonstrated their superiority through physical strength (John and 'Butchy' S) or through perceived toughness and intimidation (Stephen K). My persistent 'outside school' peer group was small, although I did explore friendships with different sorts of boys and girls: Helen W (doctors and nurses, and her brothers' plastic models on the shelves); Gillian H (who I remember promising to marry - we were 9); Atilla B, with his exotic French background and the dark flat where his mother wafted around even more darkly amid scents of rich perfumes - he wondered about whether our universe might just be inside "a giant's box"; Robert L; Tracey C, who lived in the same small blocks of flats as the previous two boys, and who I was in love with at age 10, even though the stairs up to her flat smelt of milk and dust, and echoed drearily under every footfall - even in later years, when I was delivering milk, or papers, or election leaflets to these flats, I remembered that weird sense of threat that I felt on those early visits, tied up, I think, with the time when, as a cub scout on 'bob a job' week, I accepted an old lady's bag of bottles, promising to take them to the off-licence and bring back the deposit money...of course I dropped the bag and broke some bottles, and the offie was shut when I got there, so I dumped the remnants in a bin outside the (equally closed) off-licence; Chris H, the epitome of the spoiled rich kid; Nicky H, my next-door neighbour, who I thought was spoiled, and who had all the toys that he wanted, of which I was massively jealous; Tracey W, who lived over the road at number 12 (another prepubescent platonic friendship); and Andrew M, who was my bestest friend for a long time, and in whose company I was happy to discover (I realise in retrospect) that it was OK to be interested in intellectual pursuits and in music - I think that his parents were both teachers, and their house had a piano and music stands as well as a lot of books, an apple tree that was was climbable, and a brick-walled cold-frame that you could get into, pull the cold-frame over, and treat as a bunker. They also had a jar half-filled with jam in their garden in the summer, and I remember being fascinated and appalled by the way that the wasps went straight past me (a relief) and descended on the jam, only to become stuck, and struggle, and eventually be killed with a dose of water; even then, I recall being uncomfortable about that aspect. Astonishingly, they had a private house - yes, a house that they themselves owned. I don't think we knew anyone else like that that (except Helen W's parents, perhaps - but I never registered that...only that they seemed 'posh'. I suppose that I should have twigged, even then, that the houses on our side of the road were all 'council', and the houses on the other side of the road weren't.

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CH³CH²OH - part 2

So, where was I? Ah yes, listening to the near-silence at the end of that King Crimson album in that early 70s bedroom, one afternoon after school. The lisp of the dust-muffled needle is slurring across the album run-out, the tone arm veering in towards the LP's centre and the shiny chrome - what's it called? the spindle? Christ, how can I have forgotten that? Bloody digital age. Anyway, the record's finishing, and we'll probably go downstairs for some tea and sandwiches; the Holmes household is very hospitable (though it smells different to ours - more perfumey and foody, I think). Later, we might look dubiously and naively at a specialist magazine that we've procured from somewhere.

Later still, as dusk comes down, I'll walk the mile home, breathing in the lead from the A312's copious car exhaust supplies, while the orange street lamps come on and the sky above the housing estate darkens down to a mustardy-grey, dusty colour - all light pollution and urban haze. (In later years I'll hanker after being an astronomer, and sit in the back garden with blankets pegged up on the washing lines to shield me from the constant haze of light that climbs sixty degrees up the sky all around. It's hopeless, though - all I can see, most of the time, are the brightest stars of the most obvious and prominent constellations; even these, though, are exciting - the Plough, Cassiopeia and, best of all, the magnificent structure of Orion. Sometimes there are power cuts around this period (the miners are on strike, there's a three-day working week, and papers and magazines are severely truncated to save energy and materials). When all the streetlights and house lights are off, and there are just the car headlamps at low level, blocked off by the brick wall at the at the side of the last garden in our row of houses, I might see some more stars, especially on blue-black winter nights, things that I think might be Auriga and Taurus or, in the summer, Cygnus, Pegasus and Draco; these constellations are vaguer and only momentarily glimpsed, assembled in my mind from a series of mental snapshots taken through the wobbling object lens (?) of my cheap (but much prized) telescope, and I'm never entirely sure how much of the constellation was reality and how much of it was my imagination and invention. Quite often I'll persuade myself into being excited by the blurry object that's been swinging around in the telescope's eyepiece - a nebula, a galaxy, Jupiter (or maybe it was just a fragment of cloud...).

I don't remember watching much television in these times. In the evenings, I'd lay on the floor in the lounge (we called it 'the front room') and look at my war books - I remember my particular fondness for my 'Purnell History of the Second World War' binder, which contained the first twenty or so issues of that part-work; I loved picking each weekly issue up from the newsagent - every issue was a mixture of colour and b/w photographs, quite dense text and three-view coloured paintings of aircraft, tanks and ships - all in all, a rich and concentrated confection for a pre-adolescent boy who loved military hardware and who was fascinated by war - especially the Second World War. I'd lay the binder on the floor and just page through the issues, as if I was just soaking up the images and the ambience of the photographic world, and I'd create little stories and vignettes in my head as I looked at a particular soldier's face, or the way that a wrecked truck was angled into a ditch, or the smeared face of a town that was half-hidden behind a curtain of smoke. I'd draw on my reading of Commando, War Picture Library and Victor comics, and upon my limited knowledge of national cultures and stereotypes - French, German, Polish, Russian, Finnish, British, Italian - to build up a sensory and narrative picture of what might be occurring in each image, and threading together (I now realise) a vividly-imagined chronology and 'mood picture' of the war; or, at least, of the 1939-40 period - at some stage, I broke the sequence of buying the weekly magazines (or maybe they stopped printing them because of the austerity measures? That would be a better story for me...the aching, nostalgic loss of an unfulfilled and idealised dream...). Anyway, i never completed the set (I think there were going to be six or nine volumes or something). [Compare the 'History of the Railways' part-work that we did complete...]

Upstairs, in my big bedroom high up on the second floor, which looked out over the gardens and box houses and the main road to the blocks of flats beyond, I'd play with my plastic soldiers or my miniature cars under the yellowy light, or re-read favourite books that I'd read tens of times before, or glue together model fighter planes or bombers, innocently breathing in noxious paint and adhesive fumes while I pursued the perfect rendering of three-dimensional versions of the military machines that fired my imagination in photographs and war stories. When each model was in a state of relative completion (wings, tailplane, propellor and landing gear all attached, for example), I'd pick them up and swoop and climb them in the space above my workbench (the top of my chest of drawers, covered in newspaper), imagining extended dogfights and daring, semi-suicidal bombing missions, voicing all of the participants and imitating the sound of intercom static and the clipped, stoical debriefing reports of comrades lost fighting bravely and uncomplainingly for their country and its noble cause. Then there'd be bed, and my precious new transistor radio (a 'Buccaneer', made in Korea or Taiwan, with the first incomprehensibly translated instruction sheet that I'd ever seen - this was the first piece of electronics that I'd ever owned)...my radio under the covers, and me tuning the clumsy and unresponsive dial to try and find a medium wave station - any station - that I could listen to; there were only a few UK radio stations on the air in those days - probably Radio 1 and 2, and maybe Caroline and Luxembourg; anyway, i remember hearing a lot of static and a few distant foreign voices that swept in and out of focus amid whistling and the slow scrawl of interference like the wind heard inside a seashell held up to you ear. But I remember fondly that darkness and sense of exploration, and the slowly warming plastic held against my ear and cheek, and the way that the plastic grill covering the speaker would become damp with the sweat drawn out of my skin.

(I'm sure I'll get to that CH³CH²OH thing at some stage in all this nostalgic rambling...)

CH³CH²OH - part 1

There's a scene transition in Children of Men where you find yourself looking out through the windscreen of a Rolls-Royce as it negotiates its way through one of the film's many grunge-laden and crowd-congealed streets. The soundtrack to this traverse is the final track from the old King Crimson LP, In the Court of the Crimson King. This is one of the albums that I have to thank my childhood friend Steve Holmes for turning me on to: he always seemed to be ahead of me in discovering new bands and new records, some of which I liked, and others, did not. I remember being physically shocked by "21st Century Schizoid Man", the first track on the album, when I first heard it in Steve's bedroom in the two-storey 'box house' in Radcliffe Way, Northolt. (We condescendingly called them the 'box houses', us folks who lived in the three-storey 'town houses' a little further along the A312 Yeading Lane. Very grand.)

I can't remember what kind of 'record player' Steve had, but I think it probably was a 'stereo' (noun), but it can't have had had much wattage, not back in c. 1973, when the kind of music equipment our working class demographic was using probably still had valves in it. So, it's a stereo system with little speakers - probably 5-8 watts? - in a small room in a council house. The track starts with some poodling noises that sound like flutes and blown organ pipes and electric motors switching on and off, barely audible above the hiss of surface noise and the repeated clicks of static and scratches on the vinyl transferred through the fluff-encrusted needle on the pick-up, into the record player's electronics, and down the cheap copper wires to the speakers' paper cones. That hiss and echo is suspended in my memory of that dusty room, and carries with it the marvellous sense of things unknown and unheard waiting to be discovered in the future: that elusive sense of wonder that you somehow leave behind and only rarely rediscover - perhaps finding it again when a piece of music touches right memory-evoking synapses, or when a certain tang of a stranger's perfume on a train or a bus resurrects the feelings of your first love; remembering that sense of wonder comes much more easily to me when I think about old music and old moments like this, and takes me back - in a weird, tingly-hairs-on-the-arms, beyond-consciousness-and-just-at-the-periphery-of-feling-and-knowing kind of way - to those teenaged years of high emotion, naivety and a confused sense of the colossal, untapped potential and possibilities of each human life.

So that poodling intro poodles along for a few seconds, and I kneel on the carpet of Steve's room with the cardboard gatefold sleeve in my hands, staring at the weird imagery and the printed lyrics, with no idea of what this record will sound like, or what it will mean to me in years to come, or how I'll remember it thirty years later, and suddenly this massive, intrusive, metallic noise blasts out of the speakers, the distorted mix distorted by the cheap speakers and by my own stunned incomprehension at this bizarre noise; then the grating, scratchy sound of the vocal comes in, as if it's sung through a broken megaphone, and my head starts to hurt with puzzlement and incredulity. Listening back to this music now, in digital form and through headphones, I realise that it wasn't really the acoustic qualities and the volume that shocked me, but the strange nature of the music: I hadn't heard anything like this before, and the instrumentation, time signatures and structures were all new and unknown. My head hurt because I couldn't 'understand' what I was hearing - it was, in a way, 'unhearable', because I had no framework of familiarity within which to set this noise and make it comprehensible; all of my mum and dad's records, and Radio 2's crooners and Ellas and Franks lived in a different sonic universe. This King Crimson album, with that screeching, driving, metallic opening, and the subsequent tracks with their flutes and towering mellotron sounds that all smack of sword and sorcery, fairy tale, sixties innocence and noodly, prog rock self indulgence, locked itself into a certain imaginative configuration in my mind, and it has stayed there ever since, lurking, waiting to be evoked and, in turn, to evoke the sense of place, mood and emotional states from those teenaged years.

So what's that got to do with CH₃CH₂OH, you might ask? Tomorrow, tomorrow...

Thing

“What makes Dystopias so compelling is that they confirm us in our belief that we have seen the world as it truly is, at its bleak, horrific worst in those moments when the baseness and brutality of humanity is most vivid and heart-sinkingly pervasive. Those times when we’re stripped momentarily of our idealism and hope, and can see that it’s all gone to shit and that it will never get better. We find it simultaneously reassuring and depressing that we have seen things as they really are. The act of recognition and independent confirmation brings a kind of resigned acceptance.”

Film

Have you seen Children of Men? It's well worth seeing.

Denis

The men are playing cards on top of a wooden crate. One of them says, “What can we do for you, son? You look a bit lost, mate,” without taking his cigarette out of his mouth, and one of the others laughs a funny gurgly laugh that sounded like spit and stones being stirred in a bucket.

I said, “Have you seen my pappi, please? I can’t find him.”

They look at each other and snigger. One of them says, “Now then, now then, where can he be?” and the others laugh again. The man who makes the others laugh is fat, and his overalls are too tight. His hair is combed up from above his ear and over onto the top of his head, which is shiny and greasy, like it needs a wash, like mine does on Sunday evening before I get my clothes ready for school. Looking at his hair makes me feel a little bit sick.

{Mummy washes my hair in the kitchen sink while I lie on the china draining board on my back. The [china/porcelain] is cold against my neck, and there are [raised lines/ribs/embossings] that dig into my back. Mummy uses green shampoo that stings my eyes, and pours water out of a white jug that sounds like metal whenever it knocks against the tap [ie enamel – anachronistic?] Cold water always trickles down around my neck.}

The funny man picks up the cards and looks underneath them. “Nope, not there. Maybe he’s…” and he stands up and looks around the back of the crate. “Nope, not there either. Where can he be, lads?”

I start crying. They look at me, their eyes all crinkly with laughter. I shout. “Where is my pappi? I want my pappi!” and I cry harder while they pull their mouths back in tight little smiles, like they’re trying not to laugh. The fat man, in his horrible overalls, says, “All right, son, all right, all right,” and he comes over to me and sort of squats down and puts his hand on my shoulder. I can feel through his hand that he’s rocking backwards and forwards a bit, and holding on to my shoulder so that he doesn’t overbalance.

“Now then, son, stop crying and answer some questions for me.”
I nod, pushing my bottom lip out.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Denis.”
“Denis what, Denis?”
“Denis…[surname]. From [district].”
“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. What’s your pappi’s name, son?”
“I don’t…I don’t know,” I say. They laugh.
“Don’t know your own dad’s name?”

I shake my head. And it’s true, I don’t; I’ve never heard anyone call him anything but Mr [surname], and mummy never uses his name at all – she just speaks in a certain way, so that the spaces in her words or the way she says things lets pappi and me know that it’s him she’s talking to.

They ask me some more questions about pappi: what he looks like, what job he does – and at last one of the men says, “Oh, of course, it’s [nickname] – old, er, [first name].”

The others nod, and funny fat man says, “I know where he’ll be. [the different crews/groups all have their favoured bars, just like the shifts etc used to back at NatWest] Come with me, son; I’ll take you there.”

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Everyday Epiphanies, part 423

I've watched every episode of Six Feet Under, and I know that I, all of my family and everyone I know will die, however much I love them. I know, I know, I know it: but I live in denial - I suppose most of us do. As so often, there's that gap between the understanding of the intellect and the emotional understanding and acceptance that you have to have before you really believe something.

There was a piece in the 'family' section of Saturday's Guardian about grief, and specifically about how his grief at his father's death had suddenly struck him while he was driving along in his car months later. The rest of the piece was a series of reflections about 'coming to terms' with the death of your parents, which is something that I find difficult to focus on for too long; it's difficult to think about, and even stranger to write about. I can't concentrate on it for long enough to work out what I think and feel about it. So I guess that means that what I feel about it is fear. I suppose I should think about in a mature, adult way, and try and get past that fear and discomfort...but it doesn't come easily. And I also think that it will happen, and I will feel what I feel about it, and I will deal with it the: so, in a sense, there's no point in trying to think it through beforehand, because your emotional response is unplannable, unknowable in advance.

You might say that it's 'morbid' to think about it, and there's something in that. But I also think that there comes a time when it's so obviously a reality that it's hard not not think about it: I'm sure that every generation has to learn this for themselves - there's no way of being 'told' about it; it's one of those 'intuitive' truths that seeps through you like those waves of shivery feverishness when you have a cold. And then you have that 'felt' truth embedded in you. But you push it away and drift on through your daily rituals and habits, keeping the truth of universal mortality at bay through wilful ignorance, busy-ness and alcohol (or you satiating substance/activity of choice). You nudge up against that truth once in a while, but you push it back into the shadows, where it can't make you sombre or anxious.

You (I) can't live with that knowledge at the forefront of consciousness all the time; if you (I) did, it would induce paralysis.

Life is dangerous, random and contingent. I was reminded of that on my journey to work today. I'd come off the M40 and was driving down the dual carriageway towards the roundabout, in the inside land for the slip road. The traffic was queuing back from the junction, so I was poodling along at a safe distance from the car in front, doing about 20 miles an hour, half-listening to Wogan's reactionary burblings about the insanity of road closures after accidents (or something). Looking in the mirror, I noticed a white-cabbed three and a half ton truck approaching me from behind. Fast. Much too fast to stop. As I watched, I could see that the truck was rocking from side to side under heavy braking, and I thought - what? Probably things like 'shit' and 'fuck' and 'he's going to hit me'. I swerved to the left as far as I could, in towards the grass verge and the metal railing, as close as I could to the car in front, and looked in my mirror: the truck was starting to swerve to the right, out towards the second lane. I looked in the wing mirror, and the truck juddered past in a haze of flying dust, mud and brake smoke. It missed my rear wing by about a foot and a half, but clipped the front-left wing of a car in the outside lane. The truck finally came to a halt fifty yards further down the road, and the fat young driver jumped out and ran back towards the car he'd just hit, and which had stopped amidst its own debris, the driver unbuckling his seat belt as I passed.

I should have stopped as a witness, probably, but I wasn't thinking straight: instead, my flight-or-fight reflex had cut in; as the truck had rattled past me, I'd felt as if all my blood was draining down to my feet - that strange feeling of sudden evacuation, as if you've voided your bowels, and your heart is sinking. The fear gripping you. When I got out of the car in the work car park five minutes later, I was trembling slightly all over, and my voice was shaky as I explained what had happened to a colleague, but there was also the strange feeling of elation, and alertness, and an intense sense of how alive I was. Like I'd awoken suddenly from an habitual dream.

I'm not one for over-dramatising things in a solipsistic way, as you know. But this felt like an epiphany: the wings of the angel of death wafting chilly air past my right ear as the truck bore down on me. If I'd not swerved to the left, if he'd been travelling a bit faster, if he'd left home five seconds earlier that morning...all those tiny contingencies and actions that could have had a very different outcome, and made this my last day. My last morning. My last breakfast. The last time I saw my mum. The last time I went to sleep. The last time I planned to do anything. The last sunrise. We all know that it has to come, but not yet, please. Each day and moment is too precious - if only we could remember that all the time...