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.

Multimedia message

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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.”

Multimedia message

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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...

More Denis

Yes, I know: this is rambling and directionless. But that's how I find novel-writing works for me; I find something, and follow it, and it wanders in a certain direction until it reaches what feels like an end-point. My writing isn't driven by tight plotting (not this time, anyway...), and these digressions and meanders are part of my 'finding the story' - I have a broad framework for the story and the characters, but I find that these parallel streams take on a life of their own, and I have to follow them until I find out where they are going. Even if they go nowhere useful, writing them out is, I think, all a part of finding the 'truth' of the characters and the story, a kind of background research that gives me a sense of where these people are from, and what's important - both about them and about the part they play in the story. So...it's going to be quite an edit. :-)



I put my finger in my mouth, between the bottom lip and my teeth, and then took it out again to see if there was any blood; to see where the blood-taste was coming from – but there didn’t seem to be any source. My lip felt very fat, though. I wondered if pappi could see how fat it was – whether he suspected that I had fallen over.

Pappi had just said, “Would you like to come to work with me?”, and of course I had said ‘yes’. I hadn’t thought about what we would do when we were there, or about how we would fill up the day. At first, it was just like when I went with mummy to the store: I wandered along a couple of paces behind her, trying to look as if I knew where I was going, and trying to seem as if I was on my own. Whenever she stopped to talk to a friend or a storekeeper (which was often), I would try and hide myself behind her coat so that the person she was talking to couldn’t see me – just like I had done on the bus with pappi. Always, though, it seemed that she wanted to introduce me to her friend, even if they’d seen me many times before. She’d half turn and shoo me round in front of her so that her friend could make the usual kind of comments about my age and size, and ask me questions that seemed stupid or which I thought were trying to catch me out and make me give a stupid answer. So I would mumble my stupid, monosyllabic replies and look bashful, stepping from foot to foot and trying to get back round behind mummy again as soon as possible.
Pappi made his slow progress around the [edge/terminus??] of the tram terminus, and I followed him reluctantly, like I followed mummy. Just like on the tram, there was lots of laughing and handshaking and, as I’d feared, I had to be stared at and smiled at by lots of the big men, some of whom wanted to pat me on the head, or pinch my cheeks, or ruffle my hair with their big, meaty hands. Some of them were quite rough, and hurt my scalp, and most of them smelt of tobacco or of last night’s beer.

After half an hour of this, and the men all talking about incomprehensible things, I was bored and a bit annoyed. I wanted to have something to eat, and I wanted to sit down somewhere or play with some toys or just be somewhere where I could be on my own. But pappi shows no sign of stopping his wandering and talking, and I wonder why he brought me here with him. The next time we’re on our own as we move between the different groups of men, I start tugging at his overall pocket and saying, “Pappi? Pappi?”

“Hmm?” He looks round at me, as if he’d forgotten that I was there with him.
“Can I go home now please, pappi?”
“Go home?”
“Mm.”
“Why do you want to go home? We’ve only been here for five minutes. Hm?”
“I’m tired.”
“Tired? Don’t whine, Denis. Come on – you can play on the trams while I talk to the boys.”

He grabs me by the elbow and we head off towards the men standing by the big block of trams in the centre of the terminus.
Once pappi let me get onto one of the silent, still trams, I was happier.

Denis (poor little lad)

One day, when I was still quite small, pappi took me to work with him. He was wearing his dark green [? – and cf earlier ‘coming home from work’ memories…] overalls that smelt of washing soap and oil, and a black cap with a little stiff peak that he pulled down over his eyes a little bit. I remember sitting on his lap on the tram, feeling the judder and bump of the tram as it crossed the rails (?), and feeling a bit sick from the chocolate bar that he’d given me, telling me “Don’t eat it all at once.” Naturally, I had devoured the whole thing at speed, barely stopping to chew. I looked out of the window, because it took my mind off my tummy ache and the horrible smell of all the cigarette smoke inside the tram. The sky wasn’t properly light yet, and it seemed like dark clouds were hanging low over the street. I couldn’t see very well, and I had to keep wiping fog off the inside of the window where it had steamed up from all of the passengers’ breathing and smoke. As a city employee, pappi travelled for free, and I travelled free with him: I felt proud and special when he held up his travel pass for the conductor to see; she’d smiled and nodded to him in a friendly way, and I had tried to catch her eye and have her smile at me too – I liked her face and red lips and her dark hair, and she was all smart and clean in her uniform. It occurred to me that I wished my mummy looked all smart and colourful like this lady. […]

It was raining quite hard, and the outside of the glass was covered in raindrops that ran together as the tram moved and jarred along. Sometimes the tram driver would ring his bell, and sometimes there was a little fzzzzzt and a flash of blue electricity from the top of the tram. After a while the sky got a bit lighter, and I could see that we’d left behind the apartment buildings and were moving past factories and warehouses. Soon, pappi let me stand up on his legs and pull the little cord that rang the bell to ask the driver to stop at the next [stop]. When we stepped down onto the wet pavement, with the dark clouds moving fast underneath a wet sky, I could feel the raindrops, small and sharp, against my cheeks. The air smelt of tar and coal smoke, and there was another, sharper smell – something I couldn’t identify that smelt like hot metal and paint and the iron-like smell you get in your nose when you have a nosebleed.

We had to cross the road to get to the stop for our second tram. I stood at the side of the road holding pappi’s hand, [confused/stunned/dazzled…?] by the numbers of people passing and crossing the street, which was thronged with horse-drawn and motor wagons, buses and trams, all rattling and grinding and speeding in different directions, a ceaseless blur of motion and intention. It made me blink and shy away from the road, but suddenly pappi said “Now,” and jerked at my hand, half-dragging me into the road in the midst of the traffic. My boots scrabbled across the rough stones of the road, the toes bouncing and scraping in the grooves where the tram lines ran.
We waited at the tram stop behind a queue of men all wearing identical-seeming dark grey trousers, jackets and hats; all with the same heavy boots, scuffed but solid; all with the same short back and sides haircuts, and the same weather-wrinkled necks. Only the repairs and the discolouring stains were different. As we moved forward as the tram arrived, I was squashed between pappi and the back of the nearest man, and all I could see for a moment was a white patch of sky above the funnel of their dark clothing. The man in front of me smelled bad, and I turned my face away from his clothes.

It was noisy on the second tram. We had to climb up the curving staircase as the back as the tram jerked and wobbled away from the stop, my face level with pappi’s boots as they ascended the worn wooden stairs with their embossed metal edging. Once we reached the swaying top deck, there was a chorus of greetings from men wearing the same kind of overalls as pappi. Through the fog of cigarette smoke they called “Aye aye!” and “[nickname based on his surname, with a ‘y’ added at the end], and “Wakey, wakey!” and “Eh, what? Eh what? Eh? Eh?” (to which pappi replied “What, eh? What, eh?”, and they all laughed and winked. Pappi was transformed from his usual still, quiet self into a more relaxed, tactile, smiling version of my father; he grabbed men’s elbows as he spoke to them, and laughed with his mouth open. Once, he took off his cap and slapped somebody on the chest with it. I tried to stay out of sight behind his legs and the bottom of his jacket: these men were all big and gruff and jolly and frightening, and I didn’t want them to laugh at me or to see how silly and small I was – if they did laugh at me, pappi would laugh with them, I knew. They were a gang that I wasn’t in: big men who knew things about cigarettes and drink and work and ladies and secret things that I couldn’t imagine. My cheeks were red and hot with embarrassment.

The tram swept round a curve and, before I could react and steady myself on the rocking wooden floor, I overbalanced and banged my mouth against one of the shiny metal handrails that looped above the back of the tram’s seats. My mouth went numb and I could taste blood in my mouth, and tears came into my eyes with the shock and pain of it. Fortunately, the tram passed immediately into a dark space, and no-one could see me cry or hold my hands to my face while I shook my head and moaned. My head started aching immediately, and I knew that my whole day was spoiled. The tram stopped, and the men all started moving in the near dark, back towards the staircase. I hung back in the gap between the staircase and the side of the tram, then followed them all down the stairs. Pappi hadn’t said my name or tried to find me in the darkness. I felt like crying all over again. My jaw was starting to throb.

I stood on the platform downstairs and looked for pappi, wondering if he had forgotten that I had been with him. But no, there he was on the edge of the group of men standing there in the gloomy interior of the tram terminus, shaking hands with a big fat man wearing a suit and waistcoat. When they’d finished shaking hands pappi looked back at me and jerked his head sideways to indicate that I should join him.

There was a great block of trams parked in the [gloomy] centre of the terminus. The space inside the building seemed huge and high to me, with great, windowless brick walls climbing into the shadowy roofspace. The roof was all zigzaggy, with some small skylights in the angled sections {???}; the windows were grimy with dirt and spiders webs and pigeon poo, and let in very little light. There were a few electric lights in the offices that ran around the bases of the brick walls, but otherwise the only light seemed to come from the massive doorways at two ends of the building.

There was a line of men formed across each of the two entrance doorways, and, at the far end from where we had come in, there was a brazier full of burning wood. As I watched, the men all raised their hands and waved as a blue tram passed by in the street with its bell clanging.

Multimedia message

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message

Blossom. January 5th...
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

I Know, I know...

Still a bit dormant at the moment, because trying to reconcile the new year, being back at work, being out of condition, living in a new environment and - the result of all these - feeling like I'm really short of energy. However, there are some promising signs: I wrote a few (novel) words tonight; I'm back on a healthy eating regime; and I have been laughing and smiling a lot more than in 2006. I feel as if the wheel is turning, and the days of creativity, energy and fitness are on the way back. The solipsism will continue...

Anew

Happy new year to you - whichever calendar system you happen to be on.