Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

On Monday November 9th 1989 the demolition of the Berlin Wall began. 

DIE MAUER IST RUNTER

The wall is down.  Incredulous
we contemplate, through raw gateways,
dawn in the West.  You, the baker,
me, the busdriver, here the student
carrying a flag, there the woman
who cannot forget or forgive. 
We move through rubble,
through the searchlights,
through the watercannon's crazy rain.

This is the real dance;
we stitch its paces
over the Kaiser's cobbles,
in between the Weimar tramlines,
through Hitler's broken archways, empty squares,
up and down the grim lattices
of Russian tanktracks.
Laughing, we invade the territory
inside each other's arms.

First published in Amnesty International anthology SING FREEDOM, Faber & Faber (1991)

25 UNRELATED IRRELEVANCIES ABOUT MYSELF

1. On the rare occasions when I have uncommitted time to myself I sit on the sofa and stare into the middle distance idly pondering what I might usefully do during the brief period ahead.  When the time has passed, I take a deep breath, rise, stretch and repeat the exercise.

2. I am frequently incapable of logic, patience or calm when dealing with difficult day-to-day operations in the material world. I am firmly convinced that all inanimate objects, regardless of nature or scale, are in a state of undeclared war against humankind. I share with Basil Fawlty a policy that, if a delinquent object – a chair, a vacuum cleaner, a drawer, a motor vehicle – fails to respond to reasoned argument, it must be chastised, even unto destruction.

3. At night I dream of corridors, stairwells, crowded rooms, many storeys, fast-moving groups of people. I seldom remember more than fragments of my dreams, but their unsettling influence sometimes extends well into waking hours.

4. I believe that three of the most important inventions of the 20th century are the narrow-nibbed Bic biro, Doc Marten boots and the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

5. I am a radio ham. My calllsign is G0 EUV. A few years back, when I was active, I could send and receive morse code at a rate of about 12 words a minute.

6. I once played to a capacity audience in the Royal Albert Hall.

7. In 1985 I compiled a dictionary of Anglo-Romani, the patois of the English Gypsies.

8. At the age of 8 I was a school refuser. 10 years later I applied to teacher training college.

9. In the early ‘70s I auditioned Elvis Costello as keyboard player for my band and chose someone else.

10. I have never drunk a cup of tea or coffee.

11. Three things (amongst many) that make me cry are: watching Brief Encounter yet again, Billy Bragg’s version of The Internationale, the closing scene of King Lear, Roy Orbison singing Love Hurts.

12. I am virtually innumerate, able to manage only basic addition, subtraction and multiplication.

13. I may yet hear the call, I guess, but, here and now, at this moment, it's my quiet conviction that there is no God.

14. When I was a teacher at the King Alfred School in North-West London, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivien gave my wife and I a kitten born on the set of A Clockwork Orange. When, subsequently, it became sick with meningitis, SK sent me a letter offering the services of his vet. So concerned was he as to the fate of the unfortunate cat, he provided me with his personal ‘phone number so that I could ring him ‘at any time of day or night’.

15. Had I been born a girl I would have been named Charlotte Mary Ann. I was injudicious enough to reveal this at primary school. Which might explain the school phobia.

16. With other chemically enhanced members of the band I was in at the time, I visited the derelict and deserted Nunhead Cemetery in the middle of an acid trip. Whilst all around me my companions were noisily unravelling, I experienced an all-pervading sense of calm and serenity.

17. I taught Heather McCartney when she was about 12 years old. On one occasion when I was overloaded with books and files, she kindly carried my bass guitar – an original Hofner ‘Violin’ model, the famous Paul McCartney bass – from our classroom, where I had been storing it prior to a gig directly after school, to my car.

18. In 1989, during a trip to the Urals city of Ekaterinburg (then still Sverdlovsk), as a licensed radio ham, I operated the university amateur station, putting out calls under its Soviet callsign. I was the first non-Soviet amateur radio operator to man the station and I received many glowing comments from UK and North American hams on the excellence of my English.

19. Were money no object, I would have a black three-piece corduroy suit tailor-made by Dege and Skinner. To wear with it, I would have Turnbull and Asser run me up three shirts, in, respectively, sky blue, grass green and midnight black, all in Royal Oxford weave with Windsor collars. And from Ede and Ravenscroft in Cambridge I would purchase a pair of black suede chukka boots and three pairs of silk socks in red, green and black.

20. I have no earlobes. Interpretations by others of this phenomenon vary between their being accepted as a sign of congenital genius and an indication of inbuilt diabolical tendencies.

21. One of my odder possessions is an enormous Roman clay dildo, salvaged from the shallows off the beach at Salamis in Cyprus.
 
22. Whenever I see a single magpie, I inscribe a cross in the air and say, “Good morning, Mr Magpie, how’s your wife?” I see this as insurance in a world in which nothing is certain.

23. My earliest recollection comes from around the age of 18 months. I was standing up inside my cot and my father came into the room with a ginger biscuit for me. As he approached the cot he tripped and dropped the biscuit into my full potty. I was inconsolable.

24.  As a novice skier of one week’s experience in Les Arcs, in Savoie, France, I found myself briefly at the top of a vertiginous slope. Briefly because within the two heartbeats it took to register the steepness of the slope and the length of the descent, I was on it and moving at gathering speed. Very shortly after the massive downhill acceleration, I realised that I was probably going to die. All fear left me at that point and I tucked the skis under my arms, sunk into a crouch and headed ecstatically towards oblivion. Eventually the corresponding slope on the other side of the valley into which I plunged slowed me to a halt. In a lifetime of general indolence, it was probably my most exhilarating three minutes.   

25. It is my intention to cheat disease, accident and natural decay and live well into my 90s. Either bringing this about or failing to do so is likely - probably in equal measure – to confront me with the most profound challenges to my present existential beliefs.  

 

I've always reckoned that the one vital ingredient missing from the Gospel parables is humour. Maybe if Jesus had leavened the Way, the Truth and the Light with a few sly laughs, Barabbas wouldn't have walked and Jesus wouldn't have been dealt the bum rap.

Piety's no obstacle in the world of the profane and although the works of Marx and Engels are a bit short on rib-ticklers, this political parable does the business rather well.

FREE ENTERPRISE

An American businessman on holiday was taking his ease on the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman at the tiller docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American sat himself on the edge of the jetty, complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, "Only a little while. Two - three hours?"

"Well, you're're clearly an excellent fisherman," said the American. "Why don't you stay out longer and catch more fish?"

The Mexican shrugged and replied that he had enough to support his family's immediate needs.

Intrigued, the American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?

The Mexican fisherman shrugged again and said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and talk politics with my friends. I have a full and busy life."

The American laughed. "A full and busy life? Listen, I'm a Harvard MBA. I could help you expand your business with just a few words of free advice.  Think about this.  If you spent more time fishing, you could buy a bigger boat. Then, with increased proceeds, you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. Then, of course, you’d be able to leave this little fishing village and move to Mexico City.l Then maybe L.A., and – who knows? - maybe eventually New York City, from where you'd run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long would this all take?"

The American considered for a few seconds. "10 to 15 years - 20 years at the outside, I reckon."

"But what then?"

The American laughed and said, "Now, that's the best part. When the time was right, you'd announce a public offering, sell your company stock and become very rich. You would make millions!"

"Millions, senor? Then what?"

The American said, "Well, then you could retire. You know, maybe move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and talk politics with your friends..."

LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS

Whilst rummaging through my near-complete collection of Mojo magazine prior to the house move, I came across an interview with Chrissie Hynde in the May 2007 issue. Aged 54 and semi-retired, she claims to be leading an almost rock'n'roll free life now, eschewing fame in the present and largely discounting her highly successful career.  She states also that her imperfectly tuned TV operates on only three channels and that she has never used the Internet, preferring instead to curl up on the Parker-Knoll recliner with something heavy by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Well, that's cool. Most of us would ruefully admit, I'm sure, that we spend far too much time simultaneously risking carpal tunnel syndrome at the keyboard and ruining our eyesight where we might, on occasion, be catching up on South American magic realism, or at least taking the damn dog for a walk.

But...er...she has never used the internet? Never sent an email?  Never googled the name of a long-lost school pal?  Never chased up a music website? Never bought a Marquez via Amazon?  One’s immediate reaction is that it just seems wilful, obdurate, perverse – like being electively monocular in a binocular world.

And then at leisure one reflects.  It’s a Russian doll world now – one modality within another.  How easy it is to become trapped within one tangle of social, cultural, psychological, political, technological circuitry, buzzing frantically around the tight little network, increasingly unaware of the alternative options.  And, of course, increasingly unaware – if ever awareness there was in the first place – of the larger, simpler schemata within which the various microsystems function.

I’m reminded of a story that one-time alternative DJ Pete Drummond (Radio One bookend to early BBC John Peel) told me back in the early ‘70s.  He was living at the time in Westbourne Grove, then the dormitory quarter for London’s terminally cool. Following a gig spinning the discs between two bands at local hippiedrome All Saints Hall, Pete found himself on a broken sofa in a flat in Chepstow Place, awaiting his turn on the bamboo bong making its way around the room.  The pipe had circulated several times and most of the congregation were by now pretty much catatonic, but Pete was conscious that his neighbour had managed to crank his head around a wobbly 75 degrees and was about to speak.
“Hey, man”, he croaked. “Like, what axe* do you play?”
Ever the polite public schoolboy, Pete smiled apologetically.
“Sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t play an axe”.
“Wow!” his neighbour gasped. “What’s it like?”

Okay, probably you had to be there. But point of story here is: remember – it was once an analogue world and for many the trimphone, the portable typewriter and the cassette recorder remain the apogee of technological achievement.  While we’re…well, doing what I’m doing now, Analogue Man/Woman is striding across the greensward carrying a packed lunch and a stout stick & breathing God’s good air.

So, all power to Chrissie Hynde, the three-channel tele and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in front of a log fire.  Just as soon as I’ve upstreamed this, I’m going to download myself into the Parker-Knoll with a copy of Ulysses…

*If you're reading this, you must be positively cuboid. It means musical instrument, man.

A couple of years ago, during a period of poetic slumber, I posted the first drafts of a series of autobiographical sketches. For reasons that seemed clever and innovative at the time, I entitled them Inklings. Here they come again in intermittent second drafts.

INKLINGS 1

There is a railway embankment on the far side of a strip of common land opposite the flat in Balham, South-West London.  Clearly visible from the wide living room window is a siding onto which freight trucks are shunted by a tank engine. The locomotive seems angry: its wheels spin in exasperation and great gouts of steam squirt from its chimney. You kneel on a low chest covered with cushions watching through the breath-clouded window, rapt.

You are pushed in your pram from Emmanuel Road to Ritherdon Road, where Nanny and Grandpa Jones live in their second-floor flat.  You pass first through the recreation ground on Balham Common and then through a series of connecting streets, all lined with Victorian terraced houses and short parades of shops. The terraces are punctuated irregularly by partially cleared bombsites. Great A-frame timbers shore up the surviving sections of the terraces. Their end walls are huge naked, two-dimensional cartoons of domesticity: fireplaces robbed of hearths, doorways yawning into space, walls variously painted or papered - kitchens, bedrooms, dining rooms, lavatories. Snapped-off joists protrude, some still bearing sections of floorboarding. One shattered attic under a shelf of eaves still retains a bathroom sink skewed away from the wall on a single lead pipe.

In Balham High Street, up near the railway bridge, you pass the boarded-up fascia of the Cameo cinema, closed since the War. Chains and a padlock secure its double doors. A broken shoe, silted in debris and dust, lies on its side on the top step. Is the owner within, one-footed, trapped in the dark? Even within the clank and rattle of the trams swinging in and out of their station across the street, there is in that derelict place still a sense of the thick silence that follows unspeakable disaster.

...

Your bed at Granny and Grandad Roberts’ house, 1 Hockenden Cottages, is as high as a haystack. Standing, you can lean your forehead against the edge of the faded eiderdown. The room smells faintly of lavender and limewash. High up on the bed, the sheets are creamy linen, cool and heavy. The pillows are stacked three-deep and to make the bed your own, you must beat a channel in the centre of the top one with your head. On the mantelpiece is a huge green marble clock, the face set into the portico of a Greek temple. It’s stopped at 12.20.  Above it is a picture of Ruth and Naomi from The Bible. They are leaning against each other, smiling faintly.  You sleep on your back and the picture is the first thing you see as you wake up to the dawn cry of the Essex’s cockerel next door each morning.      

...

Wooden crates with slatted sides are piled high in each of the dappled clearings in the apple orchards that stretch away behind Granny and Granddad Roberts’ cottage. Faded writing is stencilled onto the end panels – McNair Vinson Farms. Deep amongst the trees, Georgie Essex and you climb high on the rickety stacks. Throwing crates down and shifting others into position, you create a fortress. The two of you crouch down inside the haphazard citadel of crates and breathe in the intoxicating fumes of generations of Cox’s pippins.

JOHN PEEL: 1939 - 2004

 

I assume that the name John Peel will be unknown to all but the most dedicated followers of British popular culture.  Here the man was seen by millions as a national treasure. It is fair to say that without his direct and active influence during 35 years as the first and foremost ‘alternative’ DJ, much of what has enriched British and European rock music during that time and beyond would have withered at source.

Within the penumbra of the all-accommodating BBC, John Peel created a second and parallel career as a whimsical, idiosyncratic, sometimes grumpy but always wise and witty broadcaster. His roaming brief carried him along many highways and byways far removed from the testosteronal world of rock and he gathered around him a new cultural constituency.    So when five years ago today John Peel died of a heart attack, there was national mourning. Wasted and whey-faced supporters of Peel’s favourite band The Fall shared an overwhelming sense of loss with elderly devotees of his Saturday morning Radio Four digest of just about everything, Home Truths.   I hope that the passing of these five years without John Peel’s sardonic drawl will be noted. On August 30^th he would have reached the decidedly un-rock’n’roll age of 70. Those making our way in that general direction would have drawn such comfort from his enduring hipness, had he been spared. 

…  

I knew John a little. We met first in 1968 in the throbbing semi-darkness of premier underground club Middle Earth, tucked beneath the busy stalls and warehouses of Covent Garden. My band was booked in for the first of a series of gigs and John was the resident DJ. We were utterly unknown and, although his voice was familiar to all who proudly wore the tangled locks of hippiedom and who had stumbled into his Perfumed Garden on pirate station Radio London, no one had a clue what he looked like.

So the two of us stood amidst gyrating dancers and swirling lights like a pair of diffident new bugs at prep school, discussing, as I recall, the feasibility of knitting an enormous sweater into which several people might fit.  We developed the theme in the cold night air over a pair of cheese rolls by a Covent Garden tea stall at 2.00 AM, speculating the progress of the occupied sweater moving down Oxford Street. We were surrounded by bemused market traders shipping in the early morning produce.  I think that in most respects we both felt more comfortable amongst these long-term residents of Covent Garden than in the company of the assorted star children and elfin waifs below.  

Over the years we made occasional contact – a postcard from me, a brief note on a BBC memo slip from him. Always the currency was humour, generally with some attempt at parody as the motif – ‘50s war films, public school novels, schoolgirl romances. There was the odd ‘phone call, a few meetings (once with his producer the late John Walters in tow, relating tales the matter of which if related now might still bring down noble families). And when in 1975 I checked in at the Head’s office on the first day of the first term at my new school, a letter awaited me addressed to ‘Dick (trading as Jo-Jo The Dog-Faced Boy) Jones’.  When I jumped ship in ‘78, leaving the pomp and circumstance of progressive rock behind for a feisty little R&B band, John (also on the run from the bloated excesses of post-‘60s rock) gave us airtime and, as a direct result, we enjoyed brief (and very parochial) glory in the prestigious listings magazineTime Out’s ‘Alternative Top Ten’.  

Later, in the mid ‘80s, John and I bumped into each other at an Oxford University college May Ball. My band was supporting Jimmy Cliff & Wet Wet Wet  and John was presenting and spinning the discs. Once again in the small hours, as we wandered the perimeter of the grounds, picking our way around the writhing or inert bodies of the country’s future leaders, John remarked drily, “There are times when I don’t greatly regret having been denied a university education”.    

Our encounters over the years were spasmodic and fleeting, but – as so many have observed – at his death I felt as though a close friend has gone.  When a politician, a church leader, a captain of industry dies, the black smoke goes up and, through the plaudits of their fellow pundits and leaders and the news media that serve them, the nation mourns. When someone whose eminence arises from a synthesis of passionate commitment and down-to-earth humanity, the people mourn.  John’s fame arose from personal qualities that, in the normal course of events, would ensure instant extinction in the feral world of mass entertainment – honesty, personal integrity, humility, humour, sincerity.  However much John Peel would have abhorred the notion, his passing left a gap that, five years on, still can’t be filled.

  

R, R & M REVISITED

There’s an old Oxfordshire saying quoted in Flora Thompson’s rural masterpiece, Lark Rise to Candleford, relating to the practical help you might get from boys at harvest time.  A character observes that “one boy’s a boy, two boys is half a boy and three boys is no boy at all”.

The same principle of diminution in proportion to increase applies to the burgeoning family.  Two children are manageable nearly all of the time. When illness, tantrum or disappearance in the crowded supermarket occur, one parent responds to the crisis while the other looks after the remaining child. But the arrival of a third child throws the symmetry and logic into complete disarray.  However compliant the third might be (and Maisie is, pretty much), the incursion of one might as well be an incursion of thirty. One finds oneself caught within that constant parental paradox of loving the interloper as fiercely as one loves the longer-term incumbents and yet indulging wistful memories of organisational equilibrium.

The labour is ceaseless; the accumulation of consumer durables is constant; the noise is relentless.  We’ve burnt out one spin dryer already within Maisie’s three years and the washing machine is clearly working up towards some sort of gastric crisis.  Nature abhors a flat surface, it seems, and every shelf and tabletop on the ground floor is cluttered with juvenile impedimenta. The stairs and landing are clogged regularly with refugee-size bags full of washed clothing and all cupboards and wardrobes have long since closed doors against the arrival of more.  In Reuben’s tiny room a serpentine wooden railway carries Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends up the mountainsides of permanently landscaped duvets, through ravines of chewed and fretted books and into a pair of Wellington boot engine sheds. Suggestions that it might be time to rationalise the rail system are met with the kind of high volume moral outrage from all three that might appropriately greet the proposal to flood a populous valley for a new reservoir.

But, just as despair begins to bite, a child will climb onto a lap and fall asleep in a drooling coil, or some long-entertained anxiety about his or her appropriate development will be dispelled in a brief moment of sudden evolution.  And it has grudgingly to be admitted that the Readers’ Digest is not wrong and kids do indeed say the cutest things.  Maisie flopped against Emma yesterday and said in the small, desolate voice that she uses for personal distress, “I’ve had three tummy-aches in my toe today”.  A little later it was time for bed and I asked Reuben – Reubs - to fetch his pyjamas and get inside them. “I’m not Reubs”, he said haughtily. “I’m Reuben and I know my rights”.  All attempts to reorientate Maisie’s nerve centres or discover the provenance of Reuben’s declaration were confounded and after a while we happily lodged the statements in the cockeyed lexicon of the child emerging into language and waited for more.

A friend emailed this to me shortly after a business visit to Shanghai. An inveterate and creative liar, I'm pretty sure he didn't source it there. However, why allow a small terminological inexactitude to get in the way of a cheap laugh? As Fox Mulder declared: "I want to believe".

 

I wrote this poem shortly after I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis. It came at the end of a long sleepless night and – as sometimes happens without its being sought – it brought some resolution and accommodation.

This is a second draft, involving some revision and addition.




NIGHT RAIN

I sleep with the toplight
half open, tipped
like an eyelid lifted
against the darkness.

Night rain is falling
and the busy talk
is all of transformation:
black on black in threads

and swatches, gravity diamonds
heading south down window
panes; the air itself
partitioned into beads

and space. Fluctuation, shift –
this parcel of earth self-
ministers, self-heals. And I
bear witness, peering

into dark whilst down below
my body ticks backwards
like a novelty clock – new
times, new intervals, deep

secret bells and slipping
gears. Yet just outside,
a skin and filament away,
the heft of falling rain

in space, through time,
against the leaves
and on the running earth
is like breathing.
   
pic: http://mulderfox.blogspot.com/2009/10/rain-comes-only-at-night.html

I took a little time off to tackle some dodgy changes in the overall picture of the sarcoidosis with which I was diagnosed two years ago. I've posted about it in the past, but have no plans to do so now beyond saying that I am still, pro tem and far as I know, sound in wind and limb.  

Business as usual will resume shortly.

 

I’ve had this poem in a state of very slow – almost elephantine – gestation for five years now. In fact, it stalled a few months after I started it in the white heat of zeal. The notion was to write a series of independent yet linked cameos depicting episodes in the career of a rock guitarist. For better or worse, the first stanza wrote itself and the others swiftly moved into place around it.

I’m not sure whether the stasis ever since is due to mere creative torpor or a deeper sense down in the engine room of there being nowhere to go with subject matter so over-exposed for so very long.  I had it in mind to write several more stanzas, dealing further with Johnny’s absorption in the substance of his music in spite of the blandishments of a world obsessed with style over content. As it stands it comprises a series of loosely chronological sketches that attest to the iconic status of the rock star, undiminished both in character and potency over 50 years. But I’m still working towards something more incisive and more crafted that will synthesise reflections on the enduring power of that iconography through rapidly changing times and the experience of the authentically creative individual trapped within it.

The posting of the first draft of the sequence four years ago drew virtually no comments at all. There was a palpable sense of a patient readership awaiting the passing of a Patteranian folly and the resumption of normal service. And there is, I have to admit, a somewhat nerdish attention paid to the minutiae of the rock and roll experience – the social context, male guitar fixation, the foreplay and aftermath of the performance process, permanent adolescence - which tend not to constitute the points of entry for most people into a casual involvement with popular music. Whatever the case, if similar reservations inhibit comment again, I ask only that you allow me my Spinal Tap moment and that you’ll slip back in again the other side of it!

For the completist, an audio version of the poem is below the text.

FOR JOHNNY THE BRIGHT STAR

Johnny is rock and roll tonight. The walls expand;
oxygen pops in his blood like sulphur; mercury
climbs behind his eyes; a riptide of tears,
of supplication, of sweat that flies in the light
like lust and breaks at his feet and he weeps
at the heart within and breath behind it all.

1.
Johnny is anonymous.  Chrysalis days  - Johnny
One-Note, tangled up in dreams and visions. 
Moonstruck waster – that’s what his father says.
Slung across a stranger’s bed, he wakes into
mid-morning light: 60 watts, piss-yellow, filtered
through a bedsit shade.  She’s done her best, he sees,
on student pickings – strung a map of Tuscany
across the kind of wallpaper that no-one ever buys
(it grows on loneliness, like fungus, like verdigris). 
She’s standing, back turned, by the sink, brewing tea. 
She’s wearing bare brown legs and her boyfriend’s sweater. 
Turning, she grins the grin that would have hung out
the moon to dry last night, drunk or sober. He grins back. 
Under a pile of dirty clothes, an old guitar. He lifts it out
and tunes to open G: I gotta mojo hand.

2.
Johnny is a sudden baptist, sacramental, in his bliss, dancing
his art before that first great gathering between such
humble walls, within such unconsidered streets. But faces tip
and spin like moons in moving water and everyone’s a stranger,
born again inside this roomful of blues. Curling the notes
like lemon peel across the darkness, Johnny jigs and reels
between drum riser and bassman on the nod. He snarls
like a jackal, cries like a child and a kind of wisdom leaks
like steam through the architecture of the song. Old shadows,
smoke over fields, green leaves in the river, someone else’s
dream cut free and floating like a cotton boll, blown by
a shower of notes through time and into the here and now.
Under strip lights, lost amongst the coiled leads and
boxed guitars, Johnny, crosslegged, smiling like a Buddha
presses the last few acid drops out of a voiceless fretboard:
the blues are here to stay.

3.
Johnny is a buccaneer ashore, swinging down from the bus
with hours to spare. Logistics in the car park for the crew:
amps, flight-cases, drugs and booze (the PA’s theirs).
For the band, some time to kill on High Street, Anytown.
A cloud of silver frames them here on land. The static
crackles; ozone tints the atmosphere. Heads turn as they hit
the bars. The girls who speculate (always the one who
stares you down, unsmiling, certain). Guys who smoulder,
hunched and lary – somebody walking and talking the dream,
so close, so near the penumbra; they sniff the air, the moth-dust
hanging, breathing a draft of the other side.  Johnny
watches the world through smoke – fag on, shades down. 
An anthem chimes from the downhome jukebox. Johnny’s
fingers close around the tune. He grins and shuffles
to the rhythm, mouths the lyric: I’m a man, I spell M-A-N.

Johnny is rock and roll tonight. The walls expand;
oxygen pops in his blood like sulphur; mercury
climbs behind his eyes; a riptide of tears,
of supplication, of sweat that flies in the light
like lust and breaks at his feet and he weeps
at the heart within and breath behind it all. 

4.
Johnny as philosopher.  Too many lights and all too bright.
Some girl who’s seen it all gets busy with a powder brush. 
(Another laid four lines of powder like a hexagram along
the bar in Hospitality).Three fingers semaphore a backwards
countdown and the camera light blinks red.  Johnny is locked
inside 8 million televisions. Every word is sound turned into
light; each syllable, however slurred or hesitant, a bubble
from the fount of truth.  He muses: it’s a pronouncement;
he wonders: it’s a proposition.  His inquisitor - all permatan
and silver toupee – grins like the smiler with the knife and,
with the world as witness, he slices Johnny paper thin like
Parma ham.  And Johnny, skinned and pinned to the electric wall,
his little truths and petty lies still drying under a studio sun,
hides behind his National steel and sings the blues: 
All the friends I had are gone.

5.
Johnny as Christ crucified, ecce homo hanging high
above the crowd, a Breughel skull chinning his shoulder. 
This is the fable of blue veins, the night sweats, needles
and the damage done.  Even now he walks like a man
pacing out his own shape in the ground.  He whistles up
the dog and climbs the path towards the dower house.
Security throws the switch: lights burst against the dark
like flowers.  Ambushed by their blooming, Johnny ducks,
combat weary from the paparazzi wars.  He punches in
the combination, pushes at the Tudor door.  An owl hoots
in the spinney.  Johnny turns and smiles into the night.
Later, in his roomful of blues, he reaches down the Gibson
cherry-red and brushes out 12 bars, unplugged and razor-
thin: the thrill is gone.

NB The italicised phrases at the end of each stanza are the titles of or refrains from well-known blues.

Download JOHNNY 1.

I posted a version of Funny Peculiar three years ago.  A home DVD viewing of a documentary about the English comedian Tommy Cooper followed by an impassioned debate between the three Brits (including myself), two Americans and a Canadian inspired its re-posting.

I recognise for the second time that in revealing the vapidity and puerility of one's sense of humour, one risks dramatic reassessment (or maybe confirmation) of all other salient features of one's personality. But here's the meditation again, complete with knee-weakening gags, probing that elastic boundary that both links and separates our dual cultures.

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Much is made of the supposedly yawning gulf between the North American and British senses of humour.  In these post-Friends, post-Seinfeld days it seems pretty much a non-issue.  In fact, most of the people who are enlightened enough to share my view on things would agree that there are more laughs per square minute in the above two sit-coms than in one arid hour of the home-grown equivalent.  Leaving aside the unaccountably bizarre liking that Americans are reported to have for the grotesquely unfunny Benny Hill and the creakily archaic Are You Being Served?, it's generally reckoned over here that they're calling the shots comedy-wise.

There are, however, two areas of British comic taste which, I am informed, continue to baffle Americans.  Where puns and ironic self-deprecation will have Brits incontinent with laughter, Americans will tend to remain stony-faced.  One can only speculate concerning what this tells us about the two cultures, but I suspect that it reveals more about the Brits than it does about the Americans.  Underpinning both, I believe, is that enduring, indeed, endearing British insistence on the ramshackle and amateur as having greater intrinsic worth than the sleek and professional.  This curiously potent relic from a time when in cricket and rugby football there were Gentlemen and Players – when to take money, or even immoderate praise, for activities that really ought to be undertaken purely for the sake of doing them – still informs so much of what British culture is all about.  So the cockeyed comedy of The Fast Show how (maybe largely unknown in the States but beloved of Johnny Depp), Eddie Izzard, Paul Merton and - from the ancient days of variety - the doyen of them all, the late Tommy Cooper carries much of this prevailing influence within it.  We are laughing at heroic failure, cheerful incompetence, beautiful losers who can’t get it right but who radiate a sort of nobility for even trying in the first place.

The following gags were sent to me by a friend who knew that they would have the same effect on me as they did on him.  And he was right.  For reasons that I can only guess at in the light of the above speculations, they had me helpless.  The one about the cross-eyed dog and the vet did for me completely and has been mailed to countless uncomprehending pals who are now concerned for the balance of my mind.

If any of you have equally inane one or two-liners, please let me know.  It would make me feel so much better about myself…

Two peanuts walk into a rather rough bar, not looking for any trouble. Unfortunately, one was a salted.

A sandwich walks into a bar. The barman says, "Sorry we don't serve food in here".

A dyslexic man walks into a bra...

A man goes to a fancy dress party dressed only in his Y-fronts. A woman comes up to him and ask: "What are you supposed to be?"
The man says, "A premature ejaculation."
"Er...explain," demands the woman.
The man says: "I've just come in my pants."

Two aerials meet on a roof, fall in love get married. The ceremony was rubbish but the reception was brilliant.

Two ogres are eating a clown. One asks the other: "Does this taste funny to you?"

A man with a strawberry stuck up his ass goes to the doctor. The Doctor says, "I'll give you some cream to put on it."
 
"Doc, I can't stop singing The Green, Green Grass of Home."
"That sounds like Tom Jones syndrome."
"Is it common?"
"Well… It's not unusual”.
 
Two cows standing next to each other in a field. Daisy says to Dolly, "I was artificially inseminated this morning."
"I don't believe you," says Dolly.
"It's true, straight up, no bull!"

A guy walks into the psychiatrist wearing only a pair of cling film shorts. The shrink says, "Well, I can clearly see you're nuts."

Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar. One says, "I think I've lost an electron."
The other asks, "Are you sure?"
The first replies, "Yes, I'm positive."

Answerphone message: "If you want to buy marijuana, press the hash key".

A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet and says, "My dog's cross-eyed.  Is there anything you can do for him?"
"Well," says the vet, "let's have a look at him".
So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth. Finally, he says, "I'm afraid I’m going to have to put him down"
"What? Just because he's cross-eyed?"
"No, because he's really heavy"

I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day. I looked around the store but I couldn't find any.

I went to the butchers the other day and I bet him £50 that he couldn't reach the meat off the top shelf.  He stepped back, took a look and said, "No, you're right, the steaks are too high."

My friend drowned in a bowl of muesli. He was pulled in by a strong currant.

A man came round in hospital after a serious accident.
“Doctor, doctor!” he shouts. “I can't feel my legs!"
The doctor replied, "I know you can't. I had to amputate your arms".

I went to a really energetic fancy dress ‘come-as-seafood’ party last week and pulled a mussel.
 
A man walks into a doctor's surgery.
"What seems to be the problem?" asks the doc.
"It's ... um ... well ... I have five penises", replies the man.
"Blimey!" says the doctor. "How do your trousers fit?"
"Like a glove."
 
Our ice cream man was found lying on the floor of his van covered with hundreds and thousands. Police say that he topped himself.

Deja moo: the feeling that you've heard this bullshit before.

READWRITEPOEM : 94

This is a merged and partially re-written version of two poems posted in first draft form last year. 

There's an audio version of the poem at the bottom of the page.

THE WAY THINGS ARE

Sit down here, by this closed window,
just outside the golden zone
of my tilted light
and consider it this way:
that not even the dust remains
of how things were
before the long sleep of reason;
that not a leaf in sandstone,
nor a wing trapped in amber -
not even a carbon trace is left                              
of what once might have been.

(And relax.

Just relax
and listen only
to my voice
for my voice is as music
and this is the only song.)

You know the properties
of hope,
of dreams,
of rumours.
You know how rich
the imagined landscape,
and how true and strong
the stranger’s voice,
its cadences as clear
as falling water
and as cleansing.
And then the sightings here and there,
glimpses of the enchanters in their motley,
dancing by firelight and singing
in the old tongue?

Maybe.

Maybe.

But now reflect on this:
this light that shivers
in my brandy glass;
these blue fumes
that rise from my cigarette,
they are of the real world.
The sound of footsteps
on a metal staircase;
your own voice repeating
your own name when the night
is darkest.

All you need, all
you need.
Watch and listen with me now,
just the two of us, and know
from these my words and this,
the sound of my voice,
the way things are.

Download THE WAY THINGS ARE

I value kindness to humans first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan

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The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
Mahatma Gandhi

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In all times and in all places is Creation.

In all times and in all places is Death.
Man is a Gateway.
Carl Jung