Before The Honey

I'm going to resist the temptation to say too much about this one. When I used to introduce it at gigs, I'd get great mileage out of claiming it was based on a real life event, often starting my introduction by claiming that it was a document of the typical experience of having attractive thirty-something women breaking into your East London flat in the middle of the night.

People would either laugh incredulously or heckle, obviously, because that's patently not true, but amazingly I have been asked who it was based on. "Who was this terrifying woman?" someone said in a concerned fashion after a gig.

The answer? Everybody and nobody. Without giving the game away too much, I was having an almost adolescent session of philosophically musing to myself about how much compromise takes place in relationships, how much their success depends upon being in the right place at the right time, and how suitable, lovable people seemingly emerge from the ether just at the time you're mature enough to deal with them, and how this can almost feel as if it's been plotted out for you by invisible or manipulative hands, even to the extent of you being seduced or bashed around the head by the comforts of conformity. Somehow, that romantic and anti-romantic naval-gazing eventually morphed into this poem, which perhaps partly addresses some of those questions but to be honest, probably just raises a hell of a lot more (not least about my state of mind).

The woman isn't based on anyone in particular at all, and while I was writing it the vision I had was actually very vague and imprecise. I've always imagined her to have blonde highlights in her hair and a green summer dress on, but that's as much as I ever saw. If you see more, let me know.

It's a very simple poem but it's one of the few old ones I don't get the sudden urge to stick red lines through and rewrite. What it sets out to do, it does, and it feels like it weaves a neat narrative and has some images I still quite like. In particular, the line "before you honeyed me to death" could have about four different interpretations, any of which is correct so far as I'm concerned (as smug as that sounds). Interestingly, how people interpret it seems to depend upon how they feel about relationships in general. It probably doesn't help that the scenario sounds so terrifying...

If you want to read it rather than listen to it, you can do so here.

Newport Pagnell

One of the weirdest things I've found about live poetry is that it tends to be the material I feel lukewarm, or at best ambivalent about that gets the strongest responses from audiences.

This one is particularly odd. It was inspired by a really bad poetry night I attended, filled to the brim with wannabe slam superstars who had all the swagger but no decent material, and I envisaged that my own particular idea of hell would involve being stuck on a broken down coach on a motorway siding near a dull town with them (but not actually IN the town - too interesting, that). I have no memory of why I picked Newport Pagnell in particular, but perhaps something about the name itself and the town's proximity to Milton Keynes loaned itself neatly to the concept (I might be imagining this, but I think an early draft might even have used Milton Keynes instead of Newport Pagnell, but I correctly dropped it as being too much of a cliche). 

I really quickly wrote up the basic idea on the tube journey home, with two suited city workers sat either side of me making no attempt to disguise the fact they were gawping at what I was doing with interest and perhaps concern (which may have further fed into the poem's atmosphere of frustration and irritation). I tidied it up the following day and promptly forgot all about it, until I tested it at the "Poetry Unplugged" open mic one Tuesday evening and found it went down astoundingly well, even picking up compliments from people who haven't always been kind about my work. 

From then on, it became a feature of every set I did for at least three years, always getting the same enthusiastic audience response, until I decided to ditch it one day. Why? Well, the nagging doubts I always had about it never quite disappeared, and it turned out I wasn't alone. My wife complained about it one evening, arguing that it was a long rant about poetry and wannabes and "not about anything that really matters to anyone else". Somebody approached me after a gig to complain about the "bad vibes" the poem gave off. I performed it at an open spot at "Bang Said The Gun" and again, a couple of members of the audience took exception to the general tone. This would have been a brilliant response and their irritation would have been seen as proof of my genius if I genuinely believed that I'd written a savage piece of satire exposing the shortcomings and downsizable downsides of the spoken word circuit, but I really didn't. I too was plagued with doubts about the poem, and their criticisms felt far too on-the-money for my liking. 

This was also written at a time of enormous change in the poetry circuit when younger, streetwise and more naturally confident performers were surging towards the headline spots, and part of me wondered if I was responding to this threat with the insecurity and jealousy of an old lag rather than with honest criticism. Some of the poets who inspired the anger to begin with have probably developed into fine writers and performers by now, and possibly part of me wanted the live poetry circuit to remain an outlet and entertainment option for geeks, freaks, outsiders and weirdos rather than the flash boys and girls of London. I don't know this for a fact, but once the idea occurred to me, it never really went away. 

Anyway, fast forward to 2020 and I was slightly surprised when I was in the Poetry Cafe shortly before lockdown and someone collared me and asked me to do "Newport Pagnell" again. It's been retired for at least seven years now, but I suppose its repetition and the snappy simplicity of some of the imagery means it is, if nothing else, memorable to those who heard it. I don't like to use a lot of repetition in poetry, but the few examples where I have - primarily this and "Slow Death Of Another Trade" - have paid off with a much higher recognition factor and probably helped me to get gigs. 

People have often asked who inspired the "shit in a slogan T-shirt from Surrey" line in the poem. The boring answer is it's a composite again. It is true to say, however, that early on my days in the circuit I knew someone who was obsessed with success and discovering a good formula over and above everything else, and tended to sneer at anybody who "lacked ambition" - ironic, then, that he disappeared without trace very quickly before getting any gigs, perhaps realising that poetry was never going to scratch the fame itch he clearly had. Nonetheless, he never wore a slogan t-shirt - other poets who weren't very good did.

I would occasionally go into long, fanciful, almost surreal monologues before starting this poem at gigs, building up fanciful pictures about who this character was, to the extent that the audience thought I was having some kind of breakdown, before revealing them to be exaggerations and lies. There is no interesting story to be told here. To be honest, though, I often think those weird, rambling monologues were funnier and more interesting than the poem itself, though sadly I don't have any recorded examples.

Still, here's a live recording of the poem itself, so anyone who ever really wants to hear it again can just press play to their heart's content. This was recorded at the Live Poetry Podcast event at the Poetry Cafe, which I remember as being a fantastic evening (hosted and run by Dominic O'Rourke - long time no see/hear, Dom, if you're reading this). I don't think the poem itself is due a revival, though. 

Checking The Engine

Right, so this is a new one. A poem which hasn't even found a place in a live set yet, because it was written too close to lockdown (and who knows, maybe it never will. Maybe I'll decide I don't like it by the time I'm even back into a position to think about live sets again).

One of the problems I have with poetry as an artform, which I'm sure I've written about before, is the idea that everything is a confessional - that as soon as you write about it, it's both the whole truth and nothing but the truth (rarely so; often poets have a tendency to pick places or objects which scan better or which stronger metaphors can be built around) and something you feel really strongly about, or have suffered some trauma over. Otherwise, why put pen to paper in the first place? Well... the truth is that ideas are largely uncontrollable, and if two things which seem as if they could connect incredibly well in a poem pop into my head at the same time, then I'm hardly going to be able to resist the temptation just because it's not a burning issue or it may lead to false impressions. 

"Checking The Engine" wasn't inspired by a recent situation, but by those awkward relationships which have dogged both my life and everyone else's periodically. The people you're meant to get along with and life has thrown you together with, and have nothing against, but have noticed are a little stern, false or disapproving around you. Partners of friends whose differences of taste and opinion have somehow become a problem rather than something to be laughed off. Neighbours who wish they weren't living next door to you, without ever really telling you why. Dinner party guests who have taken an immediate dislike to you for working in the arts or writing poetry (you can only assume, having never met them before, and given that these are the only facts they've been provided about you). Usually what causes these people to finally snap isn't a serious situation, but an honest mistake or a trivial issue which then creates an eruption of rage, like one of Frank Spencer's jowl-quivering foes in "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em".

I'm going to resist the temptation to say whether the concluding lines of this poem are the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but they are based on something that actually happened to me. I did own a racing car duvet as a child - the top of it nearest the pillow was a cockpit, and the road stretched ahead on the rest of the covering. God, I loved sitting up in it and pretending to drive my bed around the chicanes of Brands Hatch, or imagine I was sleeping in a racing car for the night and not a warm house. I sat up for ages twisting an imaginary steering wheel pretending that I was an adult and I was able to drive, and of course, in the end I never actually learnt. Anyway.... POEM. 

X

Back in the days when I had the time, and also when email was a less dominant form of written communication, I used to be a prolific letter writer. Some of the letters I wrote were sent to female friends I was now living some distance away from, or pen-pals I'd somehow accumulated through my interests in music or poetry.

The ways these narratives usually progress in film and fiction is that the person receiving these letters - which are, of course, witty, wise and often confessional, because we all think we're astonishing at writing letters, obviously - gets wooed by the writer and a serious relationship ensues.

That never happened to me, but whenever I entered into a relationship through other less extraordinary means, the letters often became a source of jealousy and suspicion. Likewise, at least one of the partners of the recipients of my letters made enquiries about who I was and what was going on, even though he didn't live on the same continent or time zone as me.

To summarise the problem in a nutshell, the posted written word can be quite loaded and more dangerous and easier to misinterpret than a phone call. That's the inspiration for this poem/prose piece (call it what you want) over and above everything else.

As to whether an event actually occurred as suggested in the audio below, not really. I never had a proper conversation with a partner about the appropriateness of someone else's behaviour, though I did have to deal with the odd withering comment or raised eyebrow ("Oh, I see [insert name here] has been in touch yet again") - but pretending I did have a serious issue gives the piece something to react off and bounce against; plus, giving the piece an interrupting additional voice also serves the added purpose of making me sound like less of a vain shit who is assuming romantic interest from someone else where there might actually be none. Now do you see how deceptive people who think about writing a lot can be? Stick to phone calls, that's my advice.

If you'd prefer not to engage with the audio below and just read the piece you can find the text here.

Being English

Some poems never really get old, unfortunately. Years ago while at a writing workshop, I was warned to stop writing "topical" poems. The world moves too fast these days, I was told, and the turning cycle of publishing houses is slower than an oil tanker in high winds - by writing about political events, I was usually giving my work a six month "use by" date. 

This turned out to be rubbish advice (and possibly inaccurate nautical advice, though I'm no expert). While it's certainly true that political parties move at an incredibly swift pace, and the emergence of new figureheads and influential voices constantly surprises - I couldn't have foreseen Donald Trump becoming president when I first wrote this poem, though I might have had an inkling that Boris Johnson would eventually become Prime Minister - the underlying tensions seldom change that much. The political pendulum is constantly trying to find its natural resting place, and poems and works of literature which seem irrelevant one year can frequently become relevant again two years hence, however much you might wish that weren't the case. Sometimes all you need to do with political poems is swap the names of the politicians around a bit, and hey presto, they're relevant again and nobody is any the wiser.  

Still, nobody is actually named in this poem and none of the above really nails what it's actually about, but the lines "we are immeasurably, utterly sorry for every state of affairs/ but nothing must change" leapt out at me yesterday, and you'll know why. Apologies come easily to us as a nation. Shifting the entire narrative and instigating real change, on the other hand, often seems too frightening, too sudden and impolite, undoes far too much "tradition". Enough said, hopefully.

There's lots of bits of this poem I don't like anymore and I'd do it differently if I had to do it all over again, but that will never stop being a problem either...

A Year In Morse

I hope you're all keeping well. If you've also been staying productive and writing a lot of new poetry, then I doff my cap to you - or I would, if I had a cap to begin with, but the best I can do instead is ruffle my overgrown lockdown hair in general approval. Will that do?

I'm very happy for you if you're managing to write like a demon during this period, but honestly, I'm not finding it especially conducive to creative activities. I've always been someone who needs to be able to observe other people to write. The material I produce is overwhelmingly frequently about human interactions, and without any of those in my life, apart from the continual growl and bark of social media, it's very difficult to find inspiration at the moment.

Nonetheless, a huge part of me misses poetry open mics and events and just delivering my poems to a live audience, and I thought it might be good to upload some home recordings of some of my stuff here a bit more often.

"A Year In Morse" was written quite a long time ago now, and while it was definitely partly inspired by a particular situation I was in, the usual load of symbolism comes barreling in to render it more fictional than confessional in the end - not that there's much to "confess" here, in all honesty. At the time I wrote it, I was reflecting on a period of my life which was as dull and directionless as it was stressful, so it's perhaps it's not surprising it's the first poem I reached to record for the blog.

The Freedom of Workshop Rules

One of the greatest things about being young and naive wasn't my spotty face, or my social clumsiness, or the way I'd gallop speedily and enthusiastically through every exercise which actually required thought and intelligence and care... oh, hang on. Let's scrub that last one from the record, if you please. I've changed my mind.

I definitely didn't enjoy being the clueless bumpkin in the workplace with more enthusiasm than knowledge of acceptable procedures, but for writing? For writing, it made things ecstatic, electric. I never knew exactly what would happen each time. Everything felt fresh and new - the ability to surprise myself regularly. Not quite knowing what was going to come out of my pen next. Feeling only slightly in control of the situation. Naturally, it meant that I wrote reams of material and most of it wasn't any good, but the flukes, even the flawed flukes which needed cuts and spit and polish, used to make me feel as if I'd just channeled an accomplished dead writer who, for reasons known only to him or herself, had chosen my writing hand at that point in time to dump some reasonable work on the page. They felt surprising and I barely recognised myself in the finished work.

That feeling seems to fade over time, and writing becomes less of a spontaneous exercise. In fact, when you've been writing for a number of decades, it can become so lacking in spontaneity that you become more prone to dumping serviceable, average and unremarkable work on to the page than slightly dirty gold. You overthink each sentence as you write it, ignoring your brain's first prompts. Is that word you're going to use really what you wanted to say? It's not, is it? "Dirty gold", what are you thinking, David? (SHUT UP BRAIN. I need to think about this for another five minutes).

I've been attending workshops recently with the primary aim of getting some of that spontaneity back, the idea being that heavy edits after a first draft are the best approach to writing, not careful consideration during phase one which should be lighter touch. During these sessions, someone introduced an exercise which for me worked really well and bought some of that raw pleasure back into writing again. I was given a fairly run-of-the-mill topic (freedom) then forced to change perspective every few minutes while I wrote as quickly as possible. How does freedom feel? When did you last experience it? What does it look like? Not as a societal concept, but as a thing, in front of you? And on it went.

The feeling I had while writing this was fantastic, because I was forced to be very quick and spontaneous around subjects and perspectives which were completely out of my control, and relinquishing that control meant - ironically - freer expression. I was no longer bound by my own expectations of the outcome, because I had none to begin with.

I'm reproducing exactly what I wrote below, not for admiration - because God knows it's a quick exercise rather than a short story or a poem - but to prove that as unlikely as these workshop techniques sound, they do have a clear value. Lots of this prose went in directions I'd never have expected. If you want to find more workshop ideas you can try during lockdown, there's lots all over the Internet. Some will probably work better than others, but even the most hackneyed ideas like freedom, childhood memories or the best holiday you ever had can produce surprising and even unusual results, provided you keep an open mind and introduce some randomness into the proceedings.

Freedom

I feel most free when I have forgotten who I am, when there are no expectations, no rules about my usual conduct. Or perhaps I should say - I feel most free when I am able to pretend that I have forgotten who I am. Maybe that's while I'm on stage, or have had enough to drink to convince others that I'm no longer in my usual casing.

I sometimes look down at my pen and think it's a form of freedom, that any moment now it might flip something out of me that I would never dream of sharing, but usually it doesn't. It pulls forward on its own leash. 

I sometimes feel terrified when I'm free, or liberated, or angry or even in love, it depends totally on the circumstances. Fear because suddenly there is nobody to guide me, angry because I've found a way out and others haven't. 

My earliest memory felt like freedom - aged three, running and shouting around Stonehenge, and most of my feelings of freedom stem from childhood even though I wasn't really - somebody was watching, somebody could catch me.

Freedom feels like a spiky, spiny, smooth and brittle pine cone, one which shatters if you hold it too tightly or drops to the floor if you don't take hold of it strongly enough. It smells of nature mixed with alcohol, of wood with no grain or sculptured finish, nothing to suggest the passing of time or the imposition of the tree on your ideas of its life.

It's not something you can see the margins of, though the margins are there somewhere, on the outer edge of the structure. They are rubber bands, thinner than the line of life itself, bouncing your thoughts from the edge to the epicentre - let go and you'll even feel them move.

It rolls around like a ball but moves at a speed so variable it will confused the keenest scientist, stops mid-air sometimes before dropping like an anvil on to the head of an escaping coyote, or rises upwards like a bird retreating from danger.

Sometimes I think I can see it, usually late at night when everyone is resting, and the foxes aren't outside. I think I see it as a transparent globe with a blurred blue and red core, like a glass marble waiting to be chipped away to unlock the swirls inside. Then I fall asleep. 

I don't know where it comes from, I just think it probably doesn't get permission to exist from America, or the West, or our collective force, or art, or any of these places we think it stems from. I just think it's there through a belief that it exists, and when that belief fades, it too becomes a fuzzy outline, fading behind the trees, the grass, the living room lights and outside the barracks of the nearest military town. 

The people who would banish it usually fear it, are usually keen to believe it doesn't exist, don't want it because they are terrified of what they themselves might do with it - but that seems to be no reason to make the rest of us suffer. 

Everybody Loves You When You're Down And Out

Many years ago, an acquaintance who shall remain nameless posted an update on Facebook stating that they were shocked - and upset - by the fact that one of their friends seemed to have turned against them since they'd been offered a major writing opportunity. My response was, in retrospect, poorly timed. I replied to suggest that unfortunately there would always be somebody who hated the fact you'd got to the top of the tree before them, adding that jealousy and backstabbing were rife in the creative industries. I think I got called cold and cynical in response. Oh well - call a spade a spade, I suppose, although under the circumstances "cold, tactless gobshite" would have been more appropriate. I must make a mental note not to offer condescending titbits of advice when people are still upset.

But allow me a few minutes grace to defend my point of view in general, readers. It seems to me that when most people first enter a creative sphere - be that art, music, writing or even taxidermy - they are immediately struck by the comradely, good-natured attitude of most of the people engaged in the activity. They all seem encouraging, dispensing words of advice, getting the drinks in, and generally seeming like an extended family. "It's great!" the person in question will usually blog, "I've heard that London is full of careerist, backstabbing, scenester arseholes, yet within four months of engaging with 'the scene' here, I've made tons of friends and I've been made to feel totally at home. Truly, this city has a thriving, welcoming underground!" Oh - OK, nobody ever blogged this, to the best of my knowledge. But I know that I did put something exactly like this in my diary once, back in the days when I kept one.

I wasn't completely wrong, but then again I wasn't 100% correct either. Foulweather friends exist just as much as fairweather friends do, although I've been fortunate enough not to be on the boot end of many of them in London, partly due to my at-best-middling (and by now low) profile on my particular circuit, I suspect. I'm forced to recall a musician friend of mine who got to a point in her career when she received a small mention in the NME, and some late night airplay on Radio One. She picked up the telephone to relay this information to somebody she considered to be a close friend, and was horrified by the abruptness of his response. "I never want to talk to you again," he simply replied. She laughed, believing this to be a joke at first, but had her worst fears realised when the line went dead, and he did indeed cut himself out of her social life. She never went on to further success, so an apparently good friendship was terminated for the sake of a Radio One play hardly anybody heard, and a brief NME mention it's doubtful many people noticed.

This is admittedly the most extreme example I can think of, and to put it into some sort of context it's worth noting that the NME girl's friend had ceased his involvement with music a few years before due to a road accident which left him unable to continue playing effectively - so the bitterness doubtless stemmed from a very troubled, impotent place. Yet there are other examples too, and I've never understood why some people engaged with art regard success as a betrayal of the conditions of their friendship. Contrary to Morrissey's lyrics, it's fantastic when your friends become successful. Not just because they're your friends, and it's marvellous to see them content, appreciated and happy, but because there's some small vindication in watching people you believed in, people whose ideas you shared, getting the respect they deserve. I have friends I feel envious of, but never jealous of. And if anybody is unable to feel good about the success of their comrades and can only feel green eyed rage rising in their gut, surely having a friend on the inside is also extremely valuable? Sometimes the truly cold-hearted are too wrapped up in their teeth-grinding jealousy to even be mercenary and cynical about the situation. Truly, this is not the attitude that wins.

On the flip side of the coin, what I can understand - because I've felt it myself - is the infuriating sensation of unjustness when somebody seemingly without much talent, who isn't a friend at all, leaps up the ladder via friends in higher places, or their background, networking abilities or looks. I used to have a talented singer-songwriter housemate who spat invective every time one of Dido's wispy paeans to cocktail party melodrama seeped out of the radio, and I could feel her pain. I could hear she was better than Dido, and she knew she was better than Dido, but there was nothing she could do about it. Whilst her famous rival sang frailly about the regret she felt for having to dump her fiance to go on a two year world tour to promote her album, she was stuck listening to me arguing on the phone with the landlord about the unrepaired broken boiler. Anybody would have been pissed off about the whole situation.

Ultimately though, the arts aren't fair. History is littered with examples of talented people being ignored, whilst the mediocre and the at-best-rubbish forge ahead. My other blog "Left and to the Back" has become a catalogue of the unfortunately ignored who mistimed their entrances or else just weren't fashionable or pretty enough. Still though, these days, when I pick up a newspaper and see somebody much younger than me - because they're always much younger than me now - being touted as the latest genius when all they've produced are a few pieces of semi-amusing doggerel, I go quiet for ten minutes or so, and get slightly twitchy. Then I sigh. It's OK, you know. It's all right. Really. I won't comment on Facebook about it. I won't blog about how over-rated they are, about how this is just one more example of the emperor's new clothes. If they've anything to offer, it will become apparent in time, and their discovery will prove to be an early lucky break. If they've nothing to offer, they'll be forgotten about in two years, and that will be that. It's not worth starting wars over. Especially when I know, deep down, that if ever I get the same treatment, plenty of people more talented than me will also feel that same, slightly depressed chill, and I hope - deep down - that they'll remember I'm a relatively nice person, and won't feel the urge to smash my windows in, or, worse still, wipe my number off their mobile phone.

The Fluffiness of Poetry Bunnies

There are a few drawbacks to having been on the London poetry circuit for nearly twenty years. The idea that if you're not highly successful by now you're probably rubbish/ damaged goods, to give one example. Social media networkers-come-poets half your age approaching you with well-meaning but unsolicited and useless advice, to offer another. This sort of thing is, if nothing else, at least slightly understandable. The one recurring downside I've never got my head around, however, is the assumption that everyone who is a long-term performer must be a supremely confident human being.

Hyper-Confident? Are you kidding me? Confident? Listen, there are moments where my stage persona appears very assured, but that's just because I know nobody will give any poet a fair hearing if they're shuffling around mumbling apologetically. 

In reality, I've met and watched some fantastic performers over the years, many of whom not only clearly - while in that moment - believed in their work so much it bordered on arrogance, but could charm the audience into forging a bond with them too. Off-stage, though? That energy and charisma quickly dissipates into neurosis and finger-biting in the bar area. Niall O'Sullivan tweeted something very perceptive only a week ago: "Many assume that all performers are extroverts but it’s often the opposite. Introverts can be attracted to performance because it’s a social situation where they have more control than usual while shying away from other forms of human contact."

On the general scale of things I'm probably midway between an extrovert and an introvert. Perfectly friendly and approachable most of the time, but not so chummy that having a complete stranger hugging me after a gig doesn't make me a little bit uncomfortable. And of course, those strangers notice this, and tend to think that I'm being stand-offish or rude rather than just slightly nervous or awkward. After all, I seemed pretty cocksure beforehand.

And no matter how long poets have been going on stages or behind lecterns or microphones for, or how successful we are, the following gives most of us a horrible, creeping dread:

1. Reading new work for the first time.

I'm probably a fairly extreme example, but I have such a pathological hatred of this that I've been known to put off doing it for years, using the "six months in the drawer, then reassess the work" method as a crutch and an excuse rather than a tool, employing it for every single re-write. In some cases, this fear has cost me in ways I would never have previously anticipated. I wrote a tribute to Jazzman John Clarke on the way to his funeral, then lost my nerve and failed to read it at his wake, worrying that it was too inappropriately jokey and frivolous in places. Of course, it wasn't, and would never have been taken that way. There's some heavy irony in this situation given that he was one of the best spontaneous poets I've ever come across and had the least self-conscious approach of anyone I've met - me making an exception and allowing for nerves and self-doubt, just that once, would have shown that I'd learned some lessons from the man.

If work has already been read or performed to approval or applause, you know that something about it is appreciated by at least some people, it works to at least an extent, and even if it gets an uncertain reception the next time, its moment will come around again. Putting your personal views, thoughts and emotions on the line for the very first time feels unnerving however long you've been writing poetry for. If it's sentimental rubbish or poorly constructed, the audience might switch off believing that the rest of your work is of an equal quality. And if it's supposed to be a wry, ironic or satirical take on the world and is so poorly written that it ends up getting taken at face value, you're in real trouble.

I actually read a brand new poem, only a few hours old at Poetry Unplugged on Tuesday and even doing that, in an open mic space where scratchy draft work-in-progress is tolerated, took a lot out of me. I slumped back into my chair with a big sigh of relief afterwards, then felt a bit pathetic for needing to do so.

2. Catching the eye of somebody who clearly doesn't enjoy what you're doing.

And then, worse still, having to stand behind them in the queue for drinks in the interval, with both of you pretending that nothing has happened - even though one of you has been reading poems at the other for the last fifteen minutes, which is hardly an everyday occurrence.

I've had gigs where the audience has been almost completely on my side, but the people I can usually remember most - years down the line - are the ones who behaved in a critical way. The one who folded his arms and refused to applaud as I walked off the stage, only catching my eye and giving me a sideways look that clearly said "Hear that applause? You don't deserve it, pal" (middle aged, tubby, bearded). The one who got visibly annoyed halfway through "Starstuck" and slung her bag under her arm and stormed out of the venue (slim, dyed blonde hair, mid-twenties). The one who came up to me after a successful gig and said "I don't understand what planet you're on or what you think you're trying to achieve" (curt young male, glasses, short, French).

Why do I remember these people and their appearance and characteristics much more than anyone else? Because like most writers, I'm a sensitive bunny, that's why. In the early days I used to actually try to return my gaze to people who clearly weren't enjoying my work five minutes, ten minutes, and fifteen minutes later just to see if the situation had improved and they'd somehow changed their minds, but you quickly learn that such self-obsessed and pathetic behaviour can crash an entire gig if you're not careful.

This cuts both ways. Once, I wasn't enjoying someone else's gig. He arrived onstage late on a Friday night, read the room incredibly well and noticed that half the audience were drunk, and included a bit of raucous doggerel about the joys of alcohol into his set to get them on-side. It went down a storm with everyone apart from me - I was relatively sober. I had no idea that my facial expressions were visible from where he was performing, but he later approached me with the words "Here you go, here's a flyer for my next gig, you're bound to be there since I could see you enjoying my performance tonight SO much!" then stomped off. So obviously they were.

There will be moments in his life - perhaps when he's trying to drift off to sleep or just enjoying a bowl of Cinnamon Grahams in the morning - when my face will come into his mind and he'll think "Oh, that bastard. Why did he have to be there and ruin a perfectly good evening?" But there will always be 'that bastard'. If it's not me, it will be someone else.

3. Having a well-known writer you really respect in the room. 

A double whammy of opportunity and threat. Of course, you've always wanted to meet them, but you probably wouldn't have chosen these circumstances. If the gig bombs, you've humiliated yourself in front of one of your heroes. Even if it goes well, that might be because you've pulled out your most obvious, popular work and the writer might not understand that your talent - which, obviously, is multi-faceted and deeply experimental in places, actually - is far more rounded than that.

On the other hand, if it goes brilliantly and they love it, you've potentially impressed your literary God; but who would chance those odds?

At one of my earliest full-length gigs Bob Cobbing was present, who was a big influence on my work at that point. I couldn't meet his eye and a friend reassured me that he did "vigorously applaud" two of my poems. This might have been a lie to help me sleep sounder that night. I'll never really know. All I do know is that Bob Cobbing, if he were still alive, would probably seriously dislike most of my current material and that would still bother me.

4. "The wits in the back row". 

Every performer before they take the mic, whatever their business is there - whether it's to perform comedy, monologues, poetry or even after-dinner speaking - has a finely tuned nerve alarm that goes off as soon as they notice that there's a slightly drunk hipster in the crowd being loud and over-confident. These drunken fops have always been with us, with or without the drugs that embolden them. The playwright William Wycherley makes a vague reference to a "wits row" in a theatre in the play "The Country Wife", produced in 1672, where presumably these flamboyant idiots typically quaffed and bothered Wycherley so much that he started satirising them in his own plays.

The occurrence of hecklers at poetry nights is relatively rare, but one glimpse of a drunken brat behaving in a raucous way before an event has begun puts the chills into a poet's bones - and the host and promoter's, for that matter - and makes them think that they might be about to witness one of the infrequent occasions. And coming up with a half-arsed retort to a heckle mid-way through a poem is even harder than doing it in the middle of a comedy routine. Poets always feel a bit more content when an audience isn't seen to be enjoying themselves too much before a gig.


And there you have it. Proof, if proof were really needed, that poets tend to be pathetic, insecure, egotistical people who only really want the approval of their audience and heroes. Everything you were assured they weren't when a broadsheet paper once informed you they were, in fact, the new, rebellious rock stars. Who ever would have thought the press would lie?

(Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay)

Utter! Lutonia - 6th December

*UPDATE: Sorry, due to a family bereavement I will be unable to perform at this event. However, it's a fantastic line-up and you should still attend if you can.*

It's been awhile, but I'm happy to announce I have another live appearance on 6th December. I'll be venturing outside my usual "metropolitan elite bubble"* and into Luton alongside the esteemed acts Swing & Son, Fran Isherwood, James McKay, Lucy Leagrave, Omer Truth and Mr Stephen Whiting.

You can expect some new material which I've been steadily working on, as well as the good old stuff that keeps me out of trouble when I'm dealing with new audiences who haven't heard me before anyway. There you go - there's a slice of pure, unblemished honesty for you on this Sunday afternoon. The gentle Jesus would be proud of me.

The gig will be taking place at The Theatre Bar in Luton Central Library, St George's Square, Luton LU1 2NG. The Facebook invite can be found here in case you need reminding nearer the date.

(*Of course, living in a converted garage space in one of the cheapest areas in London constitutes "elitism" these days. Or it does if you're especially feeble-minded and like hiding behind buzzwords in lieu of any reasonable arguments). 

Take This Conversation And Hand It In

I often get the impression that people who have "proper" jobs (like being engineers or medical practitioners) are suspicious of writers and artists. Their lives involve getting out of bed and going out to deliver work which either succeeds or fails in absolute, indisputable terms. No middle ground, no messing about, no "Well, the patient died, but your scalpel work was beautiful, the best I've ever seen" for the surgeon on Ward 54. No room for bluffing, either. An engineer can't say "Well, the machine doesn't work, but of course it doesn't, I didn't mean it to, can't you see the statement I was trying to make about the increased mechanisation of society?"

Back when I was in the second year of my university degree, which had a creative writing segment, a friend of mine on my course confessed that he was in "deep shit". He was due to hand in an assignment the following morning, a script for a short 25 minute theatre play, but he had managed to complete nothing. He'd started on numerous ideas which had tripped him over by the second or third page, then he'd torn them up, tried to begin again, but still got nowhere.

I, on the other hand, had been working on my script for months on end, and therefore, my friend felt, didn't have anything to worry about. "It's all right for you," he kept saying, "yours is bound to be good, you've put loads of work in... what the hell am I supposed to turn around in the space of an evening?"

I suggested a course of action to him. We would wander to the bus stop, sit there until the irregular and unreliable mini-bus service came to take him back home, and just have a very self-conscious, absurd conversation, observing random bits of behaviour, rubbish and tat as we went along. "Get on the bus, then type up what you remember of our conversation, exaggerate events slightly, make an artistic justification up for the script in your submission notes, and it will probably scrape a pass. It's better than nothing," I reckoned.

We did exactly that, and my friend stayed up all evening drinking Coke and strong coffee, and pulling together a script I think was called "The Number 17" (named after the bus he took home, naturally), editing and improving on bits and inserting Pinteresque pauses until he had something resembling an absurd piece of theatre.

You obviously know where this is headed next, so I'll spare you the long, shaggy dog story and just say it - my friend got given a 2.1 whereas I was given a third for my play. My effort was apparently over-long, over-written, and "without a decent conclusion", whereas his edit of a conversation we both had on a wet February night was "in places, fascinating, and with very naturalistic dialogue".

The way the grading system worked for creative writing at my university bachelor's course was reasonably simple. A first meant the piece of work could potentially find a place in the real world, outside the university walls, as a piece of accomplished, professional work. Anything downwards from that was effectively varying degrees of juvenilia and work in progress, so nobody was claiming that my friend had accidentally spat out a work of genius - just that it was a damn sight better than something I'd wasted months on.

For a few hours I was unsurprisingly very bitter about this result. It seemed unfair. How, when I'd put the hard yards in, had I almost failed my coursework assignment when someone doing a candle-lit rush-job could keep his overall term grade buoyant? It took me a few more months to get over the stinking grade, feeling that it was harsh beyond measure, but at the end of the year I looked again and I realised that it was a pile of shit after all. Rambling, waffly, filled to the brim with unrealistic dialogue and unlikely to hold an audience's attention for more than five minutes. I'd made the fundamental mistake of getting so droolingly carried away with the fun of creating a piece of work that I'd forgotten entirely about the audience along the way. My friend, on the other hand, had taken some unlikely raw material and sculpted it in a way that made a mundane chat seem sinister and interesting. Unlike me, he'd realised he needed to impress at least one person apart from himself at the end of the exercise.

Ours was a mixed block of university lecture rooms and halls, and we shared building spaces with people on teacher training courses and nursing degrees, and some of us lived in the halls alongside Business Studies, engineering and science students. Sometimes if you went to one of the stinking public toilets, you'd see graffiti above the toilet rolls saying "Arts Degrees - take one here". There were never any variations of this joke, and as such it became very dull very quickly, the toilet wall equivalent of a family comedy show that's never off UK Gold.

Sometimes, I worried that the other students had a point. They were spending long hours learning complex skills which had practical uses, whereas we were occasionally demonstrably winging it. And not just us, either - outside in the 'real world', as my older brother called it whenever he was ridiculing my left-wing politics, bands were knocking off songs in half-an-hour flat and having huge hits, and artists were employing assistants in their studios to do the hard graft for them.

For the most part, though, all of them had taken the long road of making many mistakes to get to that point, handing in or producing work nobody liked (but they loved), dealing with the criticism, and dusting off and starting again. We were all learning in different ways. And when they finally became so accomplished at what they were doing that they could occasionally produce great (or passable) work out of unlikely material really quickly, why resent them for it?

You should only get irritated at people who produce the same punchlines over and over, who would have us live in a world of Dad's Army repeats and reproductions of Van Gogh paintings. Sometimes the good stuff, the really surprising stuff, comes quickly, and it doesn't matter what the person who produced it was paid by the hour. Sometimes the best material for a play comes out of a conversation had with someone during a moment of minor crisis.

So if you just don't have much time in your life, pick up a pen and write to that tight deadline anyway, and hand it in, or at least put it to one side to see if it ferments into something bigger. You may be pleasantly surprised by the end results. 

Jazzman John Clarke RIP

I learned about the death of London poetry scene stalwart Jazzman John Clarke this morning, and I'm still trying to process the news. I feel slightly self-conscious about writing a blog entry about him - I'm in two minds about whether it's my place to, and it might seem distasteful to those who were closest to him rather than just a friend of his on the circuit. What I'm hoping, though, is that if I get some of my memories and thoughts down, it will help me to sleep a bit better tonight... and I can make up my mind whether I post 'publish' on this or not tomorrow morning. (update - you're reading this, so obviously I did).

First and foremost, right from the off, John was there. He was one of the first poets in London I spoke to when I moved back in 1999, and he remained a constant presence on the circuit rather than disappearing for a quiet life after a few years. That's why his death has been slightly trickier for me to process than most, I think. I'm a republican and want to see the British monarchy disbanded, but when Queen Elizabeth II passes away there's a possibility I will have my own hypocritical and confused period of low-key mourning, not because I believe in what she represents, but because her death would create a complete erasure of a figure that had dominated my life through many different means - like having an historical landmark deleted from the London skyline overnight. The London poetry circuit without John feels a bit like that, except unlike the Queen, I obviously never wanted to see his role in society diminished, though he might possibly have suited a tiara at one of his bigger gigs (he'd certainly have bloody rocked her EU flower hat).

I can't remember where I first met him (Kerouac's in Deptford? Walking The Dog? Poetry Unplugged?) but he immediately impressed with his energy, enthusiasm, the rhythm and carefree absurdity of his ideas, his beatnik image, and his excitable pre and post-gig patter which was guaranteed.

He always knew of a fantastic gig going on somewhere else in town that week, or a jazz performer you really just had to see - he was, it has to be said, good at making quite personalised recommendations to people he knew reasonably well, always on the look-out for 'your kind of thing' - and once he'd finished talking about those he'd fill you in on what he'd been up to, which would take another few minutes at least, because it was never just a few things. You had to pause whatever you were planning to do and just hear him out.

He had a few decades on me in terms of age, but his energy and determination continually shamed my own. Apparently, he had a much-hated role in a bank which he had quit early to dedicate his life to writing and performing, and it always seemed as if he was throwing himself into the practice with total zeal to make up for lost time. It was impossible to imagine him working in a bank - I sometimes probably wrongly imagined it as being like Manny's role as an accountant in "Black Books" - but he made a very convincing beat styled poet.

The first work of his I was familiar with felt, from memory, zingy and enjoyable but a little naive in places, driven largely by his energy and stage presence. He got good very quickly, though, and as his writing improved so too did his ability to improvise and speed-write in a way that had recently begun to stun me. In February this year, he attended the Mark E Smith tribute night at the Poetry Cafe purely on a whim. He had no idea the tribute night was on, and had turned up to the cafe purely on the offchance of catching up with some fellow poets, having found himself wandering in that general direction. He immediately decided he was going to take part, and quickly scribbled a poem on a sheet of paper - sometimes taking breaks for conversations with people walking through the door - before going downstairs to do his slot where he read the new piece of work.

The crowd completely lapped up what he'd written and the whole thing gelled. Moreoever, he got me thinking about the value of spontaneity, and how you don't have to chisel away and toil over every piece of work for it to have some kind of meaning or value on a particular day or night. We talked about it later on, and he made me realise that sometimes, you just have to let go of your work and have fun with it, see where it leads your feet. Both the best and worst ideas flow out of your pen when you completely relinquish control. Oddly, that conversation was one of the last decent ones I had with him, and made me re-assess some of the bad habits I'd let myself get into lately, including slowly editing my work as I wrote rather than letting something fall on to the page first.

He also had a habit of popping up in unexpected places or being uncannily accurate in predicting your interests or bizarre obsessions. While I was working for Pearson Publishing in 2003, I was stunned to leave the office one day and find him strolling past on the pavement outside. He said hello and gave me a flyer for a forthcoming gig as if it was the most natural occurrence in the world, not a remarkable coincidence at all, then went on his way to whatever his appointment was. I suspect that even in a city like London, he randomly bumped into someone he knew every day.

On another occasion, he sidled up to me at an event, pointed at a random object at the wall and quoted something (I can't quite remember what) from Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" trilogy. I immediately got what he was on about and replied with something appropriate, to which he giggled enthusiastically and said "I knew you'd be into that!" He always enjoyed it when someone was locked on to his wavelength, though he seemed faintly disappointed I DJ'ed at Northern Soul nights  ("What's wrong with DJ'ing a bit of jazz?") The jazzman was always pushing his love of jazz.

I've been watching his Facebook page all day, and tributes have been flooding in from every corner of the London poetry circuit - because he was familiar with every corner of it. The man knew everyone, and his work seemed to translate to every audience, even outside the poetry world to places like Ronnie Scott's, where he occasionally gigged. I only really learned today that he would also subtly have words with promoters about suitable acts they could book, and try to influence the circuit for the better. I remember one occasion he did me a huge favour by performing one of my poems at "Bingo Master's Breakout", and sent members of the audience over to talk to me when they wanted to know more about who wrote it. I think people who didn't really know him sometimes got the impression he was a bit of a hustler, ever ready with his bag of books to sell and flyers to distribute, but he was a writer trying to sell his work, doing what writers without other jobs to rely on have to do - besides promoting himself, he also genuinely cared about and listened to what other people were offering, and freely apportioned praise to those he felt deserved it.

That's the tough part about this for all of us, I think. He was our link between the different poetry scenes, an enthusiast as well as a performer, and the rarest of things in our often introverted, insecure and occasionally self-obsessed little world - a genuine people person who would approach anyone he thought he might like completely unselfconsciously. Meeting and talking to people, and having places he could happily share his most absurd ideas without judgement, seemed to make him happy. He's one of the few poetry performers I've met you could put on the bill at a Fall tribute night, or Ronnie Scott's, or an urban spoken word event, or an anti-folk evening, or a 'serious' reading, or an event at an art gallery and get away with it. His image and enthusiasm gave everyone easy immediate points of entry, and the quality of his performances just caused everything else to click into place. I'll miss him, but so will many, many others.

Spoiling All The Paintwork

Back in the earliest days of getting regular poetry gigs on the London circuit, I used to write about them on a fairly obscure Livejournal blog I kept. Hardly anyone read it, and it was rock bottom in any Google rankings. I liked it that way, and didn't bother to publicise it at all. Initially, it felt like a halfway house between a personal diary and a public blog, read only by about thirty or forty people.

Naturally though, you can't keep secrets on the London poetry circuit, and as soon as people found out that I was not only writing about myself but also other poetry gigs I'd been to, they began to drop by in greater numbers. Nothing is more likely to grab a fellow poet's attention than finding out you're writing about them. I was never openly savage towards anyone on the blog (I'd rather not talk about people who are still finding their feet at all. What's the point?) but that didn't matter - if I made the merest hint of criticism, along the lines of "Not quite as good as the performance I saw in Camden last month, but still great", or "One of their new poems fell a bit flat", or "the event over-ran and I didn't get home until half midnight, which was a bit of a pain", people would zero in on that and assume that I was implying something far worse - that they were losing their touch, or all their new material was rubbish, or they had mismanaged their set times in a completely unprofessional way and ruined my entire life.

That's probably not surprising given how insecure a lot of writers are, but I noticed another interesting side effect of keeping a blog. If I highlighted flaws in my own performances, noting when they had gone less well and why, people also dialled up the criticism and assumed it must be far worse than I was letting on. After all, this is social media! Everyone's here to sell themselves! Nobody would ever openly confess to being "not quite up to scratch" unless they were anything other than head-slappingly awful on any given night. These are the kind of lines given to an audience to read between.

Eventually, I just stopped writing about the live poetry scene and my own day-to-day experiences on it, because I became a coward and had retreated to writing the same old non-commital beige nonsense everyone ends up writing in order not to offend anyone else or damage their own chances ("Oh, everyone writes blogs like that do they, David! I see! That includes me, obviously!" - a voice outside).

Having said all that... After 24 years of doing this, I'm sort of past caring. Which is why I'm going to be brutally honest and admit that while certain parts of the feature slot I did at Bingo Master's Breakout earlier this month flew well, other bits received bemused expressions and only polite applause. It was my first feature slot in two years with quite a lot of new material packed into the time I had available to me, and not all of it seemed as good under the glare of a live performance as it potentially could do. Also, some of my intros needed a bit more work.

These are the kinds of issues that you only get to realise in a live performance in front of a proper audience. Open mic slots tend to be short and snappy and have an entirely different dynamic to the sprawl of a full-length set. There were a few moments at BMB where I found myself thinking, while I was onstage, "Oh, there's a reason I never used to structure sets in this way or load them with so much new stuff". On the plus side, the newest poem in the set was the best received, and the longer things went on for, the more I could feel my sea legs returning. The set started in a slightly flat fashion and ended well. That's better than the opposite situation.

"Bingo Master's Breakout" remains one of the weirdest and most unlikely poetry nights on the circuit, combining karaoke, bingo and poetry to an interesting effect. Each Friday night they run follows the same pattern, starting with a Butlins atmosphere and gradually crashing into sing-a-long messiness. They also book a band at each event, meaning a lot of punters who are really only interested in music and showing off on the karaoke machine end up getting exposed to live poetry as well. It's too much of a niche idea to be partly responsible for any upswing in live poetry's popularity, but it has definitely made its own small, eccentric local contribution. I was walking down a street in Central London a few weeks back and heard two bearded young men talking about it behind me, proving that if you have an unusual themed way of delivering a poetry night, people remember and talk about it.

The last show was themed on the work of the reliably brilliant and brilliantly eccentric Lawrence out of Felt/ Denim/ Go Kart Mozart, and one thing will always stay in my mind - the dry ice machine setting all the fire alarms in the pub off. A taxi driver actually stopped his cab outside to stare at the "smoke" billowing through the upstairs windows, and was possibly in the process of dialling 999 until a cheery smile and thumbs-up from me assured him everything was OK. In all, the whole night was the best fun I've had in ages.

--------------------

I've already talked about Mark E Smith's passing on here, and weeks after the announcement of his death, things haven't quite settled down for everyone. A lot of us are still thumbing through our old records and reflecting, which has been a revelation for me in its own way. The Fall were such a constant creative force, issuing albums with such a frequency, that I usually focused on their latest LP rather than delving back into their back catalogue much (beyond the obvious favourites). Lately though, I'm finding myself picking up copies of under-rated records like "Country On The Click" (from 2003) or "Middle Class Revolt" (from 1994) and realising that while critics might like to tell you that certain periods of The Fall are better than others, every era has at least one great LP in it.

At the Mark E Smith tribute night at the Poetry Cafe on the 12th February, a few people take the stage to read their own tributes or deliver Smith's work as poetry, and the night gradually becomes as unpredictable and chaotic as a typical Fall gig. Blasts of reggae come out of the PA when they shouldn't. A Fall mega-fan who followed them from gig to gig and was eventually beaten up by the drummer Karl Burns "fifteen years before he got to Mark E Smith" gave us backstage gossip. Then finally, a poet delivered the line "Mark E Smith - he has fallen!" dramatically, and at that exact moment a picture of Smith collapsed from the wall. Everybody fell silent for a few seconds and then applauded, presumably figuring that while it probably wasn't the work of the ghost of Mark E Smith, it was probably better not to take any chances.

For my part, I read out The Fall's "Portugal", a bit of an obscure Fall track whose lyrics consist entirely of the cut-up contents of a letter or email complaining about Smith's behaviour. I'm the first reader on, and I feel slightly uneasy opening with this, because it plays into so many of the more recent cliches about him being a chaotic rock and roll character first and foremost. There's way more to The Fall than that. But it sounds great as a piece of poetry, it's huge fun to do, and it's one of the few late period Fall tracks to have a lot of wit and humour behind it ("Mountain Energie", off "Country on The Click" from the same period, is another, and the evening's organiser Paul McGrane read that later on). A few months before he died, Smith said he wanted the next LP to have more lightness and humour about it - "Portugal" points to one way things could have gone.

In common with BMB, it didn't feel like a typical poetry night. It felt like a drunken wake. Albeit one that didn't end as badly as Smith's actual official wake back in Manchester...

What do Lawrence out of Felt/ Denim and Mark E Smith have in common?

Answer: Besides continuing to stubbornly beat their own particular paths for decades without ever softening what they do... they're both the themed subject of two poetry nights coming up in London very soon, both of which I'll be involved in.

The Lawrence themed evening is at Bingo Masters Breakout, "London's premier poetry/ karaoke/ bingo night", which is exactly as described. Attendees will have the opportunity to sing Lawrence songs on the karaoke machine, win a cash prize at bingo, and listen to poetry - either from other folk on the open mic, or me in the feature slot. It is, to put it bluntly, one of the least conventional poetry nights in the UK, but has managed over a decade of activity and shows no signs of slowing down. I even managed to overhear two bearded youths talking about it while I was walking down a Central London street last week, so clearly it's reaching ver kids in the know.

It's a night that's also very, very difficult to plan a set for, but by pure coincidence I was working on a poem last year which I scrapped because I found it rather too Lawrency, and being contacted to do this gave me the excuse to pull it out of the draft folder and put some meat on its bones. So at the very least there will (probably) be that.

This will be taking place at The Betsey Trotwood at 56 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3BL on 9th February with a 7:30pm start. The Facebook details are here.

On a slightly more sober note, the death of Mark E Smith, while slightly unsurprising given recent reports of his health, still managed to shake up a lot of us on the poetry circuit. This might sound odd to outsiders, but Fall gigs were generally accidental socials for us, as we'd bump into poetry people we hadn't seen in a long while. Smith's lyrical ideas and influences were a beacon, especially to the more experimental spoken word artists, and that's resulted in a huge outpouring across social media over the last couple of weeks.

The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden is hosting a Mark E Smith special on Monday 12th February at 7:30pm, where anyone can turn up and do an open mic session where they reminisce, read Smith lyrics, poems or short stories by any of his influences, or whatever they feel is appropriate. This is a wonderful idea and I'll definitely be present, as will Tim Wells, Emma Hammond, Richard Price, Michael Shann, Matt Abbott, Claire Temple, Mark Gilfillan, Matt Melia, Dan Cockrill, Michael Wyndham, Simon Pomery and Gavin Martin… and others to be confirmed (Luke Wright - where are you?)

The Poetry Cafe is on Betterton Street, WC2 9BX, and again, the Facebook details are here.

(Thanks - kind of - to Jon Hall for the cartoon at the top of this entry, by the way). 

Box Test 2

Testing purposes only.

The Bigger The Map

At the end of another trying day, we found ourselves lying down in a suburban London Bed & Breakfast not far from where my grandmother had lived. The amber street light outside bled through a gap in the curtains, so I could make out small amounts of detail in the minimal light- Anna’s arm arching on to my chest, and the faint traces of summer freckles creeping up towards her wrist. I could also see faded hints of flowers on the uncomfortably off-white wallpaper, like faint splashes of Ribena that nobody had been considerate enough to clean off.

Aside from the noise of the odd passing car, the silence was uncomfortable – unexpected even – for a grotty B&B. I decided to break it by talking, which had not usually been a good policy at many points in the last few months.

“I’m sorry for the way I’ve been behaving lately,” I began.

“I know, I know”, she replied gently.

“This isn’t me really, you know, it’s just that I’m ill,” I continued.

“I know, I know,” she repeated.

“Everyone says so,” I added, sensing rare sympathy from her. “It’s generally agreed”.

“I know,” she said again.

The simple repetition of her words and the noise of her gentle breathing was hypnotic. I had grown used to the metronomic noise of the grand-daughter clock we owned in our Bristol flat. When Anna first moved in, she demanded I let it wind down, as it left her unable to sleep. Once I had let it run its course, though, I found I couldn’t sleep myself – I needed the reassurance of its mathematical precision, the certainty of its rhythm. Without it, I felt afraid, wide open to chaos. Right now, her breath and repetitive platitudes were taking its place.

“And this is a fresh start,” I said. “Once we get to Australia in a few weeks, we can rest for as long as we want, and I can recuperate.”

“I know,” she said wearily. “I know.”

“But things are definitely going to change”.

“I know,” she replied again, and moved her hand slowly around to touch my face. I felt her fingers pulling gently at my eyelids, and the palm of her hand brushing my nose. I had forgotten how tired I really was, and her hands felt like a rubbery foam oozing in. Sleep rushed forwards, plugging my ears and eyes, making me oblivious to everything. Before I went under, I had a strange suspicion that she said something else, something which varied the script away from the gentle reassuring rhythms she had been uttering earlier. It caused a vague pang of doubt, but whatever it was, it wasn’t loud or shocking enough to stir me from the first throes of sleep.

--------------

The next thing I knew, light was piercing its way through the open curtains, and an unfamiliar middle aged woman was stood in front of the window, talking loudly at me.

“It’s not,” she trilled camply, in the manner of a 1970s TV show puppet, “in my nature to burst into the bedrooms of strangers in this way, but it’s fifteen minutes after the time you were supposed to have left this hotel, I’m afraid. I banged and banged on the door, but you might have been dead for all I knew”.

“What?!” I replied, sitting bolt upright, desperately trying to make sense of my surroundings.

“I said,” she replied, “You have got to be out in the next fifteen minutes. Unless you want to pay for another night here, that is, and,” she sneered, “I’d say you’re not in a position to do that”.

I quickly scanned the room in a vain attempt to make sense of the situation. We had set the

travel alarm the night before, but that had disappeared from the dressing table. Along with it, Anna’s clothes, her rucksack, and her yellow summer jacket had also gone. It was almost as if she had never happened to me, as if the last five years had been some sort of peculiar dream, and I had in reality spent the time sleeping in dingy hostels like this one.

“Oh, she’s long gone, by the way,” the lady said with a pleased expression, restoring some startling sense to the moment. “She left very early this morning in quite a bad way. Having hysterics, she was. I had to sit her down with a cup of tea, try to get her to calm down.”

“Where did she go?!” I demanded forcefully. I received a baleful glare.

“Oh, she’s paid, if that’s all you’re worried about. Don’t fret about that.”

I looked up at the woman in disbelief. She was possibly the angriest individual I had encountered in the last year, and 2005 had taken me to all sorts of places – the DSS, the squalid house-shares of untrustworthy acquaintances, and, due to a misunderstanding with some officers of the law, a police cell for the night. Her face looked like a silicon mask in the process of being peeled off, with a number of pale white spots the shape of individual Rice Krispies glued to her forehead. She looked down her long nose at me from behind dark curls in her fringe, waiting for me to respond.

“Where’s she gone?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

The lady tossed a sealed envelope on to my bed, then waited for me to open it. I ripped it apart with trembling hands, only to find the words “I’M SO SORRY” written in block capitals on a torn-off piece of paper, followed by a single, meaningless “X”, presumably meant to simulate one last kiss.

“What is this?” I asked, the panic bubbling to my head, “Where is she? What happened?!”

“What happened,” replied the lady, “is what always happens. Men like you happened to her. That’s all there is to it, dear. There’s no big mystery. Unfortunately.”

“Yes,” she said, dusting the windowsill whilst I sat in stunned silence, “we had quite a chat this morning. I only spoke to her for about ten minutes or so before she went away, but it was enough to get a good picture of things. She told me all about you and her. I know all about you, don’t you worry about that. You’re lucky I’m not pulling you out of bed by the ears and kicking you on to the street, dear, though I shall be charging you for an extra day if you don’t shift your backside at some point in the next ten minutes. And don’t think I won’t call the police if you don’t have the money to pay me with”.

This made no sense at all. Anna had left me before, four times in fact, but the departures were never sudden. Forty eight hours of tears, tantrums, shouts and arguments normally preceded her exit. Friends of hers appeared at the house to pick up her things, shaking their heads at me disdainfully, and it would always seem as if she’d picked the ones I disliked the most to arrive, purely to spite me. And then we’d sort it all out on the telephone – I’d tell her what I’d been doing to improve my deteriorating ways, and she’d come back wearily, hugging me by the front door in tears. A pattern had established itself. Anna never left me without having some sort of last word. There were times when I expected her not to return, but she wasn’t the type to do things suddenly and without spelling out her reasons. There was no victory in that.

“It’s not what it seems! I don’t understand what’s going on!” I spluttered, playing the sympathy card. “I’m ill! I’m on tablets!”

“Oh, we’re all on tablets, love,” replied the crone. “I’m on so many tablets I rattle when I walk. You don’t have the monopoly on tablets, let me tell you that”.

She left the room for me to pick up last night’s clothes and bundle them back on to my body. Panting and in a rush, I slipped on the faded grey New Order T-shirt that was at least ten years old. I didn’t even listen to the band anymore – it was a relic of my youth that I’d somehow never discarded, something I’d decided to cling on to for reasons that were unclear even to me. I then leapt into my 32 inch waist red corduroy trousers that were seeming at least an inch too small for me these days, and put the wrong socks on the wrong feet, the right shoes on the right feet, picked up my rucksack and went out to the hallway where the landlady was waiting. She was relishing every moment of my misfortune, and had the final line for my departure she delivered precisely with relish, as if she had been rehearsing it for half her life.

“It’s all the same with you lot,” she said, standing before the glass front door, whose vertical lines distorted the street outside like a picture slide puzzle. “With all your big ideas. My husband was just the same. Had a perfectly good job as a lorry driver for years, then decided to quit one day because he thought he could make a living as a landscape painter”.

She awaited a response from me, something as little as a facial expression, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction.

“I mean, a landscape painter,” she scoffed. “I said to him, ‘Jerry, people have cameras nowadays. Cameras and good photographers. Nobody needs good landscape paintings, never mind yours.’ Wouldn’t have it though, would he?”

She then opened the door and made a weary waving gesture for me to walk through on the street outside, seemingly spent of her quota of words for me. It slammed behind me as soon as my right foot left the first step.

I considered knocking on the door again in an attempt to get some more information from her, but the futility of this idea slowly became apparent. My brain was in poor logical working order on an average day these days, never mind after a sudden shock. Sudden shocks had the effect of numbing its workings, making it seem as if I was viewing the world through the lenses of a penny peep strip show at the arcades. It was all dim, slow, flickering and distant, and happening to somebody else. I felt like the voyeur of my own seedy life.

I looked up and down the street for possible signs of where Anna might have gone to. I was

greeted only by arching concrete streetlamps goosenecking their way over a quiet road, and rows of bed and breakfast hotels and Victorian houses. There was no sign of anyone around at all.

I pulled the rucksack from my shoulders and tugged at the giant A-Z atlas that I’d bought the day before from a charity shop. It was leather bound, as solid on the outside as a flatpack furniture shelf, and preposterously large. Anna had tried to talk me out of buying it on account of the fact that it was heavy, old and therefore, in her words, “out of date”.

“But it’s huge! It covers all of London, and all of the far suburbs we’re going to! You can see fields on it! And the farms are all marked!” I replied enthusiastically.

“Size isn’t important,” she said in a small, tired voice, too worn out to even bother to turn her statement into a weak double-entendre, “but age is. Look at it! The M25 is just a proposed motorway on the map. It hadn’t even been built when this was published.”

“Houses disappear, but streets don’t,” I said, smugly justifying my purchase.

I felt less sure of myself in the light of a new day, but hoped I was right. I flicked through the pages, and turned to page 24, which seemed to cater for the immediate area I was stood in. Roads twisted like spaghetti around the page, with one straight, orange A road spiking through the middle of them. I sat on the wall of a neighbouring house and considered my options. The first thought that occurred to me was to return to our Bristol flat to see if Anna would be back there, but then I remembered that I had the only set of keys. She had thrown hers into the Thames a week ago in the middle of an argument, and hadn’t bothered to get any more cut. I now realised that I should probably have read something significant into that at the time.

I phoned Anna’s mobile twenty times, and on each occasion it went straight to voicemail. I then considered telephoning her mother to ascertain her whereabouts, but her mother had placed strict instructions for me never to contact her house, demands that may even be enforced by the local constabulary. I had turned up drunk there on one occasion shortly after a row, and traipsed dog shit into her pile carpet. Contrary to her claims, I hadn’t known I’d trodden in it, but the combination of the angry shouting and the smearing and the smell had used up whatever residual goodwill there was left between us.

My brain, like an old Bakelite television, was taking its time in warming up, and I decided to walk to the visitor’s farm that Anna and I had made plans to go to the night before. I’d talked long and hard about how much it would mean to me, what a large part of my life it had been when I lived with my grandmother, and if there was any hope for us at all, any semblance of romance in the world, I felt that she might actually be there, maybe waiting for me, maybe just trying to make sense of who I was. I had no better ideas.

To get to North Edge Farm, which was clearly marked in a faux-handwritten font on the atlas, I had to follow a few suburban roads that almost appeared to twist into each other, then follow a curved lane which ran alongside some common ground to the north. One thing perturbed me about the atlas. Just above where the farm was, a fat blue semi-transparent dotted line ghosted its way across the landscape, showing the then proposed route of the M25. This had not been present during my grandmother’s days, and I wondered if it might have obliterated the farm now. As I slowly walked through the mist, and heard the hum of traffic in the distance, I totted up facts and figures in my head. I had heard of the farmer near Manchester who had decided to leave his business in the middle of the north and southbound carriageways of a motorway, but was quite sure that such things were far from typical.

I quickened my pace and eventually saw a giant concrete bridge in the distance, slamming its way across the winding lane beneath with delivery lorries snarling above it. Across the open ground I could see the route of a slip road sliding off the motorway embankment leading up to a neighbouring main road, and smaller vehicles and white vans creeping towards it. It looked like the toy road network I dominated the living room with as a child.

I looked to my left for the entrance gate for the farm. It was still there, but there was no mailbox by the stile, no welcoming sign, and no signs of any cattle or life. I put one foot over the other, and clumsily hauled myself over the fence, scraping my legs into mud as I fell awkwardly to the ground.

The grass was truly overgrown and hadn’t been mowed by man or beast in some years. Grasshoppers sounded off their announcements to their potential mates, and empty tins of Special Brew lager clunked under my shoes. As I drew closer to the main farmhouse, I could see only smashed windows, and the distant traces of half-scrawled graffiti over the face of the building. The closer I got, the more the roar of the motorway obliterated the noises of nature. As a child, I would have been pursued and warned by a flock of honking geese by this point, but now, at the turn of the twenty first century, all I could hear was the snake hiss of tyres on wet tarmac, and the growling throttle of trucks.

I turned to go back to the lane, consulting my map again to consider transport routes back into London from where I could return home to Bristol. I must have cut a troubled-looking figure, for eventually a car pulled up beside me, and the driver put his head out of the window.

“Where are you looking to get to?” asked the driver, an olive skinned man with cropped hair and a matey expression.

“Well, I wanted to go and look around the farm,” I said. “It used to be here. But this is all that’s left now”.

He regarded me with an amused face.

“How old’s that map you’re looking at?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Early eighties, I guess.”

“Jesus, mate…” he said. “Listen, that farm’s been derelict for almost as long as I’ve been living round here. The farmer packed up and went. Do you drive?” he asked, disconnectedly.

“No,” I replied.

“A shame. You see, I use one of these”. He pulled out a small black box with a shimmering flat monitor screen.

“They can show you an up-to-date view of the roads in your area. Suggested routes, possible short cuts, the works. I don’t even need to think anymore with this gadget, frees my brain up for other things!” he joked.

I held my atlas up weakly.

“This is a big atlas, though,” I said. “It covers the whole area! And it was cheap.”

The man laughed at me piteously.

“Well this,” he said, holding the black box up again, “is the whole bloody country, and it fits in my hand!”

I regarded him silently.

“You need a lift back somewhere?” he asked. “Hop in if you want”.

“No,” I replied. “I’ll be fine. I came out for a walk, and I suppose I should carry on having one”.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Good luck!” then pushed his foot down aggressively on the accelerator and skidded away noisily.

I began to walk in the direction of the main road. According to the atlas, a railway station lay just two miles away, and from there I could get a train into central London. I assumed the train line, at least, would still be operating.

The roar of the motorway obliterated everything and stopped me from thinking about anything apart from the discomfort of the noise for awhile, but when I got further away I realised that my brain was working again, and the wrongness of everything that had happened recently came to the forefront. Somewhere in the country, in a mysterious, non-specified place untraceable by the man’s black box, was Anna, but no amount of technology was going to trace her at this stage, and no amount of life-changing, mood-altering pills were going to make her change her mind. She meant it this time. I knew that. The patterns of our relationship had inexplicably changed. There were no games being played anymore.

I turned back and walked towards the motorway again. The noise, the steady flow of traffic, the roar of lorries, the certainty of destinations, drowned the chaos of my life out. I welcomed the modern racket in, and gazed at the vacant farmhouse in the distance. As I looked on at it, I found myself wondering why I was in any rush to go home. It was summer, I had nothing good to go back for, and this was a kind of shelter. I could hide here for a long time to come.