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A Portfolio Life

You Who Walks Beside Me

26/7/2020

I remember now

Silence makes me mad

Thinking so hard I’m rendered wordless,

Vexed by my own thoughts.

Those pearls are only prattle

That once were wisdom

in his eyes.

Sometimes I hear a third pair of feet on the landing

And I think

Are you alive or not?

And when I come to speak to you

Or you to me

Words fail us both.

Is there nothing in your head

Or are you like me, wordless

Rendered silent by the madness

Or mad by the silence.

Keir Starmer, Andrew Sullivan and, um, me...

19/7/2020

I watch Keir Starmer play his first Prime Minister’s Question Time gig as leader of the opposition, and I think of the time I bounded up to Andrew Sullivan on the 424 bus, to home from school, like some poor sap, full of enthusiasm because I’d just read The Outsider by one AlberT CamuS (as I pronounced it, never having heard his name out loud before and only having found the book because I had spent the previous months slowly stealing all the Penguin Modern Classics from Reigate’s two second-hand bookshops and inhaling them whole). I intended also to steal some of Albert’s arguments to bolster up my side of the arguments we used to have on the bus home.

Things didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. This was always the case with Andrew Sullivan. He asked me to write a poem for the school magazine once. And then took that poem and had his 6th Form English class analyse it, without knowing who the poet was. The ensuing analysis was presented under the poem in the magazine (carefully edited – or possibly just as was – to make me look a complete twat.) I remember my girlfriend’s mum at the time reading it and giving me a look of solace that nearly knocked me off my feet, given how much she disliked and disapproved of me.

“You mean Albert Camus” he said. And him a year below me.

Andrew Sullivan? Who he? I hear you say. He’s been a key player in the smarmy political commentariat business for most of the last thirty-four years, and famously so in The United States, whilst remaining unknown here. He could easily have been a Tory Prime Minister, had he wanted, and things had fallen his way. He trod the same Oxford Union path as many. Handed on the torch to one in particular.

The other person on the bus arguing with Andrew Sullivan and, in Andrew’s eyes at least, losing, was Keir Starmer. Neither of them seems to have changed their views much. Keir has become more pragmatic, and Sullivan has the same perverse notions of freedom as our current PM, but being severely right-wing whilst being openly gay and latterly an opponent of Trump has seen him shoe-horning his rationalisations into ever more complicated shapes to fit the contradictions inherent in his ideology.

Keir Starmer, on the other hand, still basically believes in simple notions of goodness and decency and he still wants to be a good and decent man, and frankly seems to have succeeded.

When we were arguing on the bus, Sullivan’s persistence could be so stubborn that I swear several times my head spontaneously combusted. I turned to a woman listening once and said – be very worried – he’ll be Prime Minister one day. But he won’t be. The kid who sat one desk in front of him at school will be. I wonder how Andrew Sullivan feels about that.

Either way, not bad for a couple of 11+ kids, of normal stock, from a run-down state Grammar school. Which, of course, begs the question, did they do really, really, well, or do I really, really, suck?

Same as it ever was...

19/7/2020

We have filled all the world with our just desserts, with hucksters, gangsters, charlatans. These bumsnots , these bunged-up spunk nozzles, these are the ones we’ve put in charge, the ones supposed to be keeping the world in kilter, and a pandemic strikes just as we’ve surrendered ourselves to this shower of shits.

Reggie Perrin, of all people, foresaw this:

Reggie: So come on, Jimmy, who are you going to fight when this balloon of yours goes up?

Jimmy: Forces of anarchy: wreckers of law and order. Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos, vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby- pamby probation officers, rapists, papists, papist rapists, foreign surgeons - headshrinkers, who ought to be locked up, Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue- sniffers, Play For Today, squatters, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins, Up Jenkins, up everybody's, Chinese restaurants - why do you think Windsor Castle is ringed with Chinese restaurants?

Reggie: You realise the sort of people you're going to attract, don't you Jimmy? Thugs, bully-boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards, sacked security guards, racialists, Paki-bashers, queer-bashers, Chink-bashers, basher-bashers, anybody-bashers, Rear Admirals, queer Admirals, Vice-Admirals, fascists, neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, loyalists, neo- loyalists, crypto-loyalists.

Jimmy: Do you really think so? I thought support might be difficult.

With a wicked pack of cards...

29/5/2020

Anne looks at me. 'Here' she said, 'is your cardigan.
Put it on.' Thank you. I'd be lost without you.
I'd already be dead without you.
But we are all like the drowned Phoenecian sailor, I said.
We come from water, we go back to water.
We need to realise that we are water,
merely vehicles for water.
Anne said 'Yes dear, cup of tea.'

Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!

8/5/2020

We are vehicles for water
without which we are dust
and water must move
always be on the move
and when it's done with us
when it's had its fill
it discards us as a crab
might shed its shell
or a snake might
slough its skin, leaving
us as carbon, discarded
scattered on the floors
of silent seas, reflecting
only false gems of what
we once thought
ourselves to have been.

Should I get a Smart Meter?

27/2/2020

Here’s the question. Now, some of my oldest friends will say that I have an opinion on everything, and I get where they’re coming from, even though in these days of everyone shouting very loudly, I can barely venture below the line, have left twitter and shun Facebook. In the world of keyboard warriors, it turns out I’m a pacifist. Still, you would expect me to have an opinion on smart meters, and as a mung-bean knitting, Guardian-reading, do-gooding, bollocks to Brexit, metropolitan pseudo-intellectual, you would expect that I’m all in favour, have several, along with solar panels, and have long since turned my electricity surplus into a revenue stream directed towards good causes.

Yet, I’m not and I haven’t and I probably won’t.

I’ve been bombarded by my provider, Bulb, for weeks now to get one. This makes me not want one. For I am contradictory and resist pushing. “They’re free” they say. “What’s the catch?” I echo. The more they push the more I resist. Always look a gift-horse in the mouth, I say, if you’re so keen on it, what’s your own benefit? Please, they say.

Then I hear an advert, voiced by Maxine Peake, top actor and well-known lefty agitator /class warrior. And I think, ah – you’re aiming at me there are you not? At someone who loves an actor/ lefty agitator/class warrior. And instead of thinking, right-ho, here we go, I think, what are you trying to greenwash?

Which is pretty sad, isn’t it, if the advert was sincere and well-meant. See where we are?

So, I googled. And then wished I hadn’t. The first thing I clicked on was an article in The Daily Telegraph – “Six reasons not have a smart meter.” None of them of any point. Their reasoning seemed to be, this is just the sort of thing that our enemies are in favour of, so let’s be against it. They even managed to put a picture of Ed Mllliband in the middle of the article, as if to say, you know, lefties and Jews, eh?

I didn’t find any cogent reason to install one. What, I might shout at Anne not to use her hair-dryer on Mach 10, or maybe use a saucepan instead of a kettle for that one-cup brew of earth-ending selfishness? That’ll save the world. And 20 pence.

There’s a suggestion, if you can be bothered to click through enough shit, that it allows for efficiencies, not just within our home, but within our overall planning for electricity, but that left me thinking, yes, but that’s not for our benefit, that’s for your profit – why am I helping companies make more money out of me about something I honestly think shouldn’t be run for gain.

So, please, tell me, because I really feel I should want one, why?

April is the Cruellest Month...

9/1/2020

She was born in Spring. We thought we should name her accordingly. Something full of spirit and flight – new and untameable. We settled on April. This despite her being born in March. Forgive us. Always bending stories to suit our needs, it’s a disgusting habit. In retrospect we should have called her May. A terribly cautious, doubting little thing – forever pausing, half in, half out. Seeking permission, never committing.

Optimistic though. I was listening to the racing the other day and the presenter mentioned a horse called Pandora’s Box and, showing erudition beyond anything he ever had hitherto, he explained that Pandora left us with hope – the last thing out of her box of evils, as a kind of dock-leaf to ease the stings. And I thought, that’s not really right, is it, at least not if I remember my Camus, back when existentialism was the way of feet-staring box-room rebels – before Ayn Rand, pornography and Playstation offered something supposedly more. Isn’t it that hope is the last and cruellest evil out of the box; that’s certainly why we never called her Hope.

My point is, you should never start your story by naming someone after a month. And certainly not before you’ve even decided what you’ve given birth to exactly. A heroine? A girl? A story? A kitten? A memory? A wish? Plus, you know, in these days of days, I guess the real question is, should we be breeding at all?

I’m writing this in my conservatory on an early morning in September (also a terrible name – in fact, here’s a note to all authors and parents – just don’t name your child after a month and, whilst we’re here, after a day of the week). On the table in front of me is a large vase of lilacs. They remind me of some lines by that dreary cat-lover and Jew-hater (or as he would have had it, jew-hater), TS Eliot, which if I remember rightly, goes:

“Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers whilst she talks….”

Such desperate courtliness and yearning and hopelessness and perhaps I’m getting too old for such things, for when I was young, I deemed this passage out of the ground brilliant. Whereas now I find myself cleaving ever closer to Karin’s dictum that the only good poet is a dead poet.

Besides, the thing that Eliot seems to have overlooked, and rather unforgivably at that for a poet, even a dead one, is that lilacs stink. Purple, huge, dramatic but smelling like someone’s tried to hide the smell of a decomposing mouse, by spraying cheap air freshener around the room. So, I’ve just moved the lilacs and put them on the landing. This act disturbed my wife who asked me what I was doing. I said, I’m sorry, these lilacs, they are properly making me ill. She laughed and said – seems so, considering they’re lilies. Not lilacs. That’s how it is. I’m always mixing things up.

Dr Paul Evans, possibly...

15/9/2019

In 1983ish or thereabouts, Jonathan Raban and Paul Theroux, then old (and much-distanced friends), met each other for a few tortuous hours in Brighton. I know this because they both wrote about it afterwards, in two brilliant travel books about Thatcher’s Britain, Theroux’s the Kingdom by the Sea and Raban’s (superior) Coasting.

Judging by their accounts it’s not a meeting that goes well, both of them circling each other competitively (why do writers indulge in this nonsense?) and instead of enjoying each other’s company, honing passages in their heads, right there on the fly. At one stage (reports Raban) Theroux even makes a little note in his pad.

Why do I mention this? Because today, on the lower reaches of Brown Clee, Anne and I ran into a grand old chap, whilst we were walking up and he was walking down. He was carrying a supermarket bag. Anne, of course, stopped and asked him what was in it. Mushrooms. Many mushrooms. And over the next fifteen minutes we discussed all the varieties and their habitat, and this and very much that. I say we, but of course I mean he and Anne.

I wasn’t absent though. Instead, I was thinking to myself – “that’s Paul Evans, isn’t it? Is it? Dr Paul Evans, of the Guardian Country Diary, the man described in One Dog and His Man as the greatest living writer in England today. Or Shropshire, at least. The man, whom I even sent a copy of said book to, and who sent me back a lovely little card of thanks with a note to say, he agreed, Ida Gandy is indeed a much under-rated writer, and make sure you read Andrew Fusek Peters’ book on wild swimming in Shropshire.

I was just about to ask him if he was him, when he said he’d just rescued a fawn from a hedge, but didn’t know what type of deer it was, “not being very good on animals.” Oh, I thought to myself, that certainly can’t be right. There must be another bloke who looks a bit like I imagine Paul Evans to look like, wandering around the countryside, collecting ceps and chanterelles.

So, unlike that fateful day in Brighton, repeating down the years, set down for future generations, preserved for posterity, this wasn’t a chance encounter between surely the two pre-eminent Shropshire writers of the moment (disregarding Fusek-Peters and James Hannah and Jonathan Coe, and anyone else who can string a sentence together and has stumbled into the county). Which is a shame, for I’ve always thought a wander through the hills of Shropshire with Paul pointing out everything I miss, (and need to read his diary to explain), would be a rather wonderful way to spend a Sunday.

Still, just in case it was, and just in case his next diary entry is about the day he met a chatty couple up on Brown Clee whilst he was foraging for mushrooms, and spent most of the time wondering if this could be THE Gary Twynam, of One Dog and His Man fame, not forgetting Anne and Bobby, I thought I’d best file this report first, and hope I come out as the Jonathan Raban of the piece.

Ash Thursday

20/8/2019

Because I do not care to read it again
Because I do not care to read it
Because I do not care to read
Because I do not care to
Because I do not care

The Bear Necessities

4/1/2019

I caught Disney’s 1967 musical adaptation of The Jungle Book over the seasonal holidays and it’s still brilliant (and extraordinarily psychedelic).

I must have seen it at the cinema when I was five and I’ve carried it with me ever since. In particular, Baloo must have been my first ever hero, and remains my number one role model. The Bear Necessities is as close to a philosophy of life as I’ve managed, and I often cite these lyrics as my touchstone:

Now if you pick a paw, or a prickly pear
And you prick a raw paw, next time beware.
Don’t pick the prickly pear by the paw,
When you pick a pear try to use the claw
But you don’t need to use the claw
When you pick a pear of the big paw paw.

Have I given you a clue?
(Gee golly, thanks, Baloo).

The song was actually played at Karin’s funeral. I think the idea was we would all break free from our chains and dance with childlike abandon around the chapel and, being in the front row, I had the perfect opportunity to locate my inner Baloo and lead the way. To my constant regret, I’m sad to say that all the glass darkly stuff had taken hold, and timidity, embarrassment and decorum held me back.

So, with that in mind, if I have one resolution for the year, it’s to be less grown-up and more Baloo, though we’d best not tell Anne…