GAIJIN STRATEGIES
CHAPTER ONE
“Fuck it. We’ll go to Yokohama”.
What could we do? We were in Shanghai and had to get out. It was nice enough, fascinating in a cultural exchange kind of way, but I’d exchanged all the culture I wanted to. Time was running out, money was getting tight and we had to get out.
“I thought you said there was a boat going to Hong Kong?” said Ben.
“I thought there was a boat going to Hong Kong”, I said.
“You checked?”
“No, I didn’t check, but I thought there was a boat. I was told there was a boat. What do you want? I was wrong. I thought there was a boat and there isn’t.”
“You thought there was a boat? How did you think there was a boat?”
“Someone told me. They must have cancelled it.”
“According to that bloke in the office there, they cancelled it three years ago.”
“They didn’t cancel it. They just moved it.”
“To Yokohama.”
“Yeah, to Yokohama. It used to go to Hong Kong. Now it goes to Yokohama. That’s where the boat goes now.”
“Oh well. Fuck it. Yokohama.”
“Yeah. Fuck it. Yokohama.”
And that was that. That’s how I ended up in Tokyo. I was going to go to Hong Kong, but the boat changed its mind. One thing I’ve learnt in this game is to keep an open mind. Go with the flow, you know what I mean? When I was younger I used to say that life was like an apple. You’ve got to eat it now. If you keep it, save it, it goes mouldy. And then it’s gone. I said that to someone once. Thought I was being, you know, philosophical. He said “I think life is more like an orange. You've got to peel it before you get to the good bit.” Twat.
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That boat trip was the start of it all. Me and Ben – drifting on the sea heading off to something or other. Me, I’ve gone off travelling because I’m writing a book. Well, starting to write a book. I’ve got a great idea and I just wanted to get away from it all because life was getting too organised and formulaic, but we can get on to all that later.
Anyway, I’ve got an idea for a story. Listen, I thought it was a great idea for a story. Still do. It’s based on a true story, but then again, aren’t they all? It doesn’t matter. It’s a great story. A man, a student, decides to pay his way through college by being a sperm donor. So he gives his sperm and gives his sperm. It’s all good. This bloke – we’ll call him Will – is studying to be a doctor. He’s tall and blond, strong and athletic. The sort of bloke who your mother would want you to marry. This guy offers his sperm and it goes to the top of the sperm charts. He’s the perfect physical speciment.
But he’s got a secret, a secret even he doesn’t know. He (and here we’ve got to work on this a bit) has got a madness, a psychopathic madness – a congenital psychopathic madness.
Anyway, many years – well, maybe 10 years – down the line, Susan is having trouble with her daughter Molly. Molly is very bright, but she’s got an evil streak, a mean side to her that’s a little bit disturbed. And Susan doesn’t know what to do. She can’t ask her partner because she doesn’t have a partner. She never has had. A few lost loves, the usual catalogue of losers and chancers, nearlys and almosts. When Susan was 31, she met the man of her life, the Big Love. But – and we don’t need to go into the detail here – he was a twat, a lying, cheating, no-good dirty low-down hound dog. He wrecked her life and she swore – she absolutely swore – never to fall for a man again. She’d have a baby.
Anyway, back to the main story. Susan tries all sorts of things and, in the end, she goes to a parent-child therapy class because – obviously, she thinks that it’s all her fault. While she’s there, she meets another woman, like her the mother of a 10 year old girl. They start talking.
Can you guess where this one’s going? OK, let’s spell it out a bit more.
This other woman, her story is remarkably similar to Susan. She’s a lesbian but, that apart, it’s the same. Lost love, disappointment, betrayal. Refuge sought in a baby. Her baby is basically a good kid, but has got an evil streak. The same evil streak as Molly.
Now you know what’s going to happen. They start talking, they realise they both got pregnant after going to sperm donor centre in Eastbourne. Now then – this is the next question: how many other babies were born between 1980 and 1985?
So OK. That’s the pitch. It’s like a cross between The Boys From Brazil and maybe The Midwitch Cuckoos.
How many are there? Does something happen to them to ‘kick-start’ the inner madness that propels them? Shall we turn them into an army?
So anyway, I was sitting on the deck of this boat, it’s the middle of the night, dark and empty, just me and the night and the sea, and I’m thinking about the story – when the calm is disturbed by this couple. A big English bloke and his Israeli girlfriend. They were going at it big time, tearing into each other.
But then they saw us and found what they were looking for: an audience. We started talking, just passing the time. When I say, we started talking what I mean is he started talking. I started listening. Most of the time I didn’t know whether to interrupt or applaud, like I was at a show or something.
Always, there are two ways of looking at things. I could say that we met this bloke from south London on the boat who was off his tits and he read us this poem he’d written as a response to Paradise Lost. I can’t remember exactly now. He was the Devil or he was Milton and… Or I can tell you the more interesting version.
I didn’t know it at the time, but he was The One. I only met him for a brief time and I doubt that he even knew my name, but Graham was that person, and who changed my life. Graham Gaskin – and you can look his name up because this is all true – was there just at the right time and the right place to completely throw my life off course.
We’ve all got one, the person who changes everything. I’m writing this book about all that at the moment called The Nazi & The Jew about a young middle class Jewish man who, through a series of strange, some might say unfortunate, circumstances, finds himself in jail. At first he’s told that it’s all going to be OK, that it’s a single cell and he’ll be out soon enough. He’s scared by at least he’s by himself and then…. Late at night the door opens and in walks in a prisoner officer. The screw explains that the prison’s over-crowded and that Aaron, the Jewish bloke, is going to have to share. In walks in Razor, all shaved head and tattoos, a Nazi who’s one of the top figures in Combat 18, the psycho military wing of the British fascists, gangland figure and general Nazi nutter and Aaron’s worst nightmare. The cell door bangs shut and there they are, alone together.
What happens to them, how they get on, that’s the story. It’s part Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, part humanist tale and it will be a huge hit, a big seller made into a feature with Tom Cruise, but that’s for later. The important thing here is the bit about meeting a person who changes your life. That strange conjunction of place and time and people.
Anyway, we’re standing on the deck of this boat going to Yokohama and it’s the middle of the night. A beautiful night. And there’s this bloke giving us this rant about Milton and Paradise Lost. He could have been 25 or 35. Big build, longish hair, nondescript clothes. Jeans, t-shirt, that kind of thing. He was good-looking, but rough. Like he’d been away too long. And God knows where he’d been away to. Wherever it was, it hadn’t been in the Style supplement and it hadn’t been featured on the ad breaks in How To Look Good Naked. I’d gone away looking for something different and this, this was something different.
“Tokyo, huh. Fuckin place Tokyo. A zoo. Full of hooligans and fuckin Japs. You got a story going on there or what?”
Meeting this bloke, I was part thrilled, part terrified. Part of me was thinking “How cool. I go away, looking for an adventure and in the first half hour I meet my very own Dean Moriarty, some wild spirited free thing with energy to burn and a soul on fire”. The other part of me – the middle class, middle aged bloke who drives a Volvo and knows his National Insurance number off by heart – is frankly terrified and wants this bloody idiot to just go away. He was at best boorish and at worst dangerous. No, he was definitely dangerous.
“No, no story. No story and no idea” I said. And explained. “I was supposed to be going to Hong Kong. I had a job on a newspaper there, the South Morning Post, I think it’s called, but then the boat to Hong Kong stopped two years ago and the only boat now went to Yokohama and…” Even as I said it, it sounded rubbish. God knows what it sounded like to him, but it was the story.
“And you?” Graham said to Ben.
“And me” said Ben. “I’m just along for the ride.” You don’t trust this, do you, I thought to myself. Probably not a bad call.
“Sounds to me” said Graham “you’re gonna some dosh. Tokyo’s no place to be skint”. Then came the good bit.
“You wanna make a bit of cash? Easy money.”
Me, I was already suspicious. Ben was more interested. “Go on” he said.
Graham smiled at Ronit and then at us. He made a big dramatic looking around gesture – like he needed to. It was the middle of the night and we were on the deck of a boat. It wasn’t Piccadilly Circus.
He opened his bag and pulled out a pair of shoes which were about three sizes too big – and smiled. The significance was lost on me. I just thought it was odd.
“You’re a shoe salesman?”
“Something like that” said Graham and reached down into his bag again. After doing the dramatic looking around bit again – there’s nothing like milking the moment and Graham, a performer at heart, knew how to do that – he produced an inner sole which was about an inch thick and covered in thick cling film. Me and Ben might have been at the start of the story and about as worldly as a new born seal cub, but I knew what Graham was holding. Dope. Compressed dope. Moroccan.
He put the inner sole inside the shoe. “All you’ve got to do is walk. You ain’t got a problem walking, have you?”
No one said anything. I didn’t say anything. Ben didn’t say anything. The Israeli girl – Ronit – she didn’t say anything either.
“Look” said Graham, “I wouldn’t ask, but I’ve got three shoes and” – and he pointed down at his feet – “only two feet”.
No one said anything.
“I mean I’ve got three fucking soles. I can put two in my shoes, but I need someone else to go through with the other one. Just wear the shoes, walk through and I’ll give you a grand. Easy. Listen” he looked directly at me. “It’ll sort you out on Tokyo, get you started. Otherwise you’re gonna be in right shit, believe me”.
I remember looking at Graham and seeing all these Japanese war films in my head, sadistic guards beating people up – “Ve hav vays of making you tok!” OK, that’s a German war film, but you know what I mean. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Melly Chlistmas Mr Rawrence.
He’s going to walk through customs at Yokohama with these clowns shoes that are way too big and sell this lot in Tokyo. A lunatic.
I declined. Polite, of course, but firm. “Sorry, mate. I just haven’t got the nerve for that sort of thing”. Ben was tempted, I could see Ben was tempted. I could see all sorts of things. Like… Ben fancied Ronit and was showing off and I was thinking that on the list of bad ideas, flirting with Graham’s woman was off the scale.
Ben declined. Thank fuck for that.
“Look. OK, you ain’t done anything like this before but it’s OK. The Japs don’t do anything. All you’ve gotta be is polite and smile, that’s all. It’s what they do and it’s what they want us to do. You can call them anything, do anything but as long as you’re polite, it’s OK. You’ve got to remember, they think we’re some kind of dirty sub species anyway. They don’t expect anything proper.”
Nothing.
“Nah, no sweat” said Graham, “I’ll sort it”. Did he say that a bit too easily? There was an alarm going off in my head somewhere but I didn’t hear it. This bloke – who I’d already decided was trouble – had taken us into his confidence, shown us his inner sole – inner soul? Oh never mind – and made himself really vulnerable. And he’d let it go with “Nah, no sweat. I’ll sort it”. I wasn’t so much fresh off the boat. I was still on the boat.
I didn’t think any more of it at the time, though later on someone – Brad the Canadian, I think – told me that Graham’s usual trick was to hide the dope in some poor unsuspecting bastard’s back pack, let them take it through customs – and then steal the bag from them on the other side when they’d got through. Didn’t do anything like that with us. Don’t know why. Maybe he liked us. God knows.
We sat up the rest of the night, the four of us, smoking a bit while Graham told us stories about how he’d paid for the trip by blackmailing an MP he’d had a fling with. “I’m gonna write it all down and make it into a TV film. Those bastards won’t forget about me”. All I remember thinking was “Why are you telling us this?” Whatever. Back then I was so naïve about this lark I’d have believed anything. The last thing I suspected was that it was all true – but sometimes the last place you suspect is the first place you should look.
Customs was a joy. Graham insisted on walking through with us, talking to us and laughing all the way. The Japanese were pretty much like he said – they looked at us like we were slightly dirty, like they just hoped we’d go away. Curiously, it was kinda how I felt about Graham. But they humoured us and let us in.
We got through. I was terrified. He didn’t seem to give a toss. But we got through. Looking back, I don’t know why I was terrified – that business of dropping the dope in someone else’s backpack hadn’t occurred to me at all – that kind of thinking was completely off my radar. Maybe it was some kinda instinct thing. We got through.
Tokyo. We were in Tokyo. I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting that was. Tokyo. That was amazing. A month ago I was in London and now I was in Tokyo. Well, I was on a train going to Tokyo. Just me. And Ben. And Graham. And Ronit.
It was a strange journey, didn’t take long and to be honest I can’t remember much about it. I remember Graham rolling one his trouser legs up and revealing an inner sole gaffer taped to his leg. I remember that. I also remember him asking us where we were going to stay.
“I dunno” said Ben. “Some hotel in town. We’ll ask around, maybe go to tourist info or something, and find something for a few days and…”
“Like fuck you will. You’re coming with us. You ever heard of the Palace?”
“The palace?”
“The Maharajah Palace. That’s where we’re going.”
We’re going to Tokyo and we’re going to stay in The Maharajah Palace. You’ve gotta laugh. There’s a kind of inconsistency there that appealed. If I’d have thought of Tokyo and play some sort of word association game, I’d have come up with words like hi-tech, shiny, electronic, space age, digital and maybe electronic again. I’m not sure the words maharajah and palace would have come up in the top 100.
OK. Let’s turn it round the other way. If the words Maharajah Palace don’t make you think of hi-tech, shiny, electronic, space age, digital and maybe electronic again Tokyo, what did they make you think of? Opulence. Grandeur. Exotic baubles, rubies and emeralds and gold, great swathes of elaborately embroidered cloth, shimmering with their gaudiness. Probably not rusty corrugated metal and ramshackle wood. Probably not some pre-fab held up by its own indecision as to which bit should collapse first. If I’d have seen the place – regardless of where it was – I don’t think I’d have been helped. If I’d have seen the place I might have come up with Large Garden Shed. Or Decrepit Old Shack. Or Complete Fucking Dump. Maharajah Palace. It was probably funny once.
The Palace was a zoo. Well, not even a zoo. In a zoo, the animals have some kind of morality. In the Palace… that very concept was kinda dubious.
If you were the romantic type, you might say it was a rogue’s gallery. If you were a realist, you might want to move to somewhere a bit more hi-tech and shiny. Me, I thought it was charming.
It had the air of a hideaway, a place where people were… well, not exactly on the run. That’s a bit too pulp fiction, a bit too romantic, but it was definitely somewhere that felt outside the boundaries, somewhere the normal rules didn’t apply. There were probably other rules that applied.
A few years later, I was hanging out with a Norwegian girl there. I remember talking to her and a bloke called Mark, who the house doctor at the time. Elke was a sweetie, a poppet, but she was very clean living and fresh. It wasn’t so much that she was naïve, it was just that she hadn’t really considered the options before.
“How many people here take drugs?” she said to Mark.
Mark thought a bit. And then he looked at her. He didn’t really need to say anything but she knew.
“Everyone?”
Still he didn’t say anything.
“Everyone except me?”
Mark gave her some rabbit about how she was beautiful and pure and different and that’s what made her special, but she was lost in thought.
Like I say, she hadn’t really considered her options. It didn’t take her long to re-adjust, but that’s another story.
Poppy
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Jayne Warburton
WHERE HAVE I BEEN? WHERE AM I NOW?
Jayne Warburton was short and slim. She had thick brown hair cut short and slim. She was very bright and we used to talk about all sorts of things. Well, we did until I told her that I fancied the pants off her and after that we used to sit around in embarrassed silence. I remember one night when I decided to overcome my shyness and that the best way to do that was to neck a bag of speed. Not much changed. Jane sat around in embarrassed silence. I chewed the inside of my mouth off, climbed the walls and tapped my leg in furious but still embarrassed silence.
We still hung out together, but it was never the same. Eventually we drifted apart, me to Catherine, her to Liz. Liz was also short and slim with thick brown hair cut short and slim and my mate Mick fancied the pants off her. That also went well.
I’m not sure I can remember a lot more about college. Philip Morris, who had a motorbike and used to come round to our house all the time. Roy, the Welsh punk who, according to Friends Reunited now lives in Perth, Australia. Sarah, Paul Tomlin, Peter Monteith, the Afflecks Palace, that club, what was it called? Gas Panic? Or was that the one in Tokyo? Doesn’t really matter.
I studied – and I use that word with my tongue so far in my cheek it’s licking my ear – Politics and Sociology, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it now. I couldn’t tell you anything that I did, anything I wrote, anything I read. I couldn’t even tell you the names of my lecturers. (Mick told me a few weeks ago that one of our lecturers was called Phil Mole. “Phil Mole! Are you really telling me you can’t remember him?” he said as the words Phil and Mole hit my ears for, I swear, the first time ever).
I could tell you about Catherine and Jayne and Liz and Mick and seeing Joy Division and New Order’s first gig and meeting Tony Wilson, but I’m not sure that’s what you’re looking for. I could tell you about my formal education – eight O levels, three A levels and a degree. I went to Polytechnic. I left Sixth Form College with my A levels and went up to Manchester and went to Manchester Polytechnic. I quite liked the word. Polytechnic. It sounded modern and meaningless, shiny and completely lacking in any substance, but more than that I liked the way it wasn’t a university. If it had any meaning it was in defining what it wasn’t rather than what it was: it wasn’t a university. That’s what a polytechnic was, not a university. In a sense it fitted in with my story at the time - the playful inverted snob – but I genuinely liked the way it meant that I wasn’t like those people, those people who talked about “going to university” as if it was something special. I didn’t go to Manchester because of anything special. I went to Manchester because I wanted to see The Fall and Joy Division and I didn’t want to go to work. I went to Manchester because they offered me a place. I went to Manchester because I could. Life had its revenge later as it does. In the early 1990s, Manchester Polytechnic became a university, but by then I didn’t care.
A life spent in educational institutions until the age of 23 – but what did I learn there? In truth, when I look back I think I learned nothing. OK, that’s not true. I learned loads, but all of it was about life. I can’t remember a single academic thing. Not one essay I wrote, not one theory I spewed in and out.
That’s where I have been. Would I do anything different now? Of course, but that’s not the point. It’s all learning. Whether you like it or not, it’s all learning. From the moment you lift your head from the pillow to the moment you lay your head down you are learning. Everything you do in life is about learning. I’m not sure you can do anything without learning from it, whether consciously or unconsciously. Whether you take it on or not, that’s a different thing. And that’s what takes us to the where I am now. I’m Phil Mole.
When I started teaching at Brighton University, that experience in Manchester was invaluable. It was probably – no, definitely – more useful to me than it would have been if I’d have been able to remember what it was Weber said to Durkheim or whatever Derrida’s theories really meant. All that’s useful but what Manchester really told me was that – and this really quite upsetting – my mother was right. You get out what you put in. It’s about passion, about excitement, about enthusiasm – and that’s for both sides of the equation, the people who are teaching and the people who are learning. It’s up to the teacher to make his class swing. That I got nothing out of my class is just as much Phil Mole’s fault as mine. I was absent most of the time, but he should have made his class the hottest ticket in town.
Am I Phil Mole? Is my class the hottest ticket? Maybe. Probably not, but I think knowing it should be is the first step. Learning - education is important. Of course it is. Just like the shark moving forward, you never stop learning. And we all know what happened to the shark that stopped moving forward. Our job is to make that learning as exciting as meeting Jayne Warburton in the bar.
Jayne Warburton was short and slim. She had thick brown hair cut short and slim. She was very bright and we used to talk about all sorts of things. Well, we did until I told her that I fancied the pants off her and after that we used to sit around in embarrassed silence. I remember one night when I decided to overcome my shyness and that the best way to do that was to neck a bag of speed. Not much changed. Jane sat around in embarrassed silence. I chewed the inside of my mouth off, climbed the walls and tapped my leg in furious but still embarrassed silence.
We still hung out together, but it was never the same. Eventually we drifted apart, me to Catherine, her to Liz. Liz was also short and slim with thick brown hair cut short and slim and my mate Mick fancied the pants off her. That also went well.
I’m not sure I can remember a lot more about college. Philip Morris, who had a motorbike and used to come round to our house all the time. Roy, the Welsh punk who, according to Friends Reunited now lives in Perth, Australia. Sarah, Paul Tomlin, Peter Monteith, the Afflecks Palace, that club, what was it called? Gas Panic? Or was that the one in Tokyo? Doesn’t really matter.
I studied – and I use that word with my tongue so far in my cheek it’s licking my ear – Politics and Sociology, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it now. I couldn’t tell you anything that I did, anything I wrote, anything I read. I couldn’t even tell you the names of my lecturers. (Mick told me a few weeks ago that one of our lecturers was called Phil Mole. “Phil Mole! Are you really telling me you can’t remember him?” he said as the words Phil and Mole hit my ears for, I swear, the first time ever).
I could tell you about Catherine and Jayne and Liz and Mick and seeing Joy Division and New Order’s first gig and meeting Tony Wilson, but I’m not sure that’s what you’re looking for. I could tell you about my formal education – eight O levels, three A levels and a degree. I went to Polytechnic. I left Sixth Form College with my A levels and went up to Manchester and went to Manchester Polytechnic. I quite liked the word. Polytechnic. It sounded modern and meaningless, shiny and completely lacking in any substance, but more than that I liked the way it wasn’t a university. If it had any meaning it was in defining what it wasn’t rather than what it was: it wasn’t a university. That’s what a polytechnic was, not a university. In a sense it fitted in with my story at the time - the playful inverted snob – but I genuinely liked the way it meant that I wasn’t like those people, those people who talked about “going to university” as if it was something special. I didn’t go to Manchester because of anything special. I went to Manchester because I wanted to see The Fall and Joy Division and I didn’t want to go to work. I went to Manchester because they offered me a place. I went to Manchester because I could. Life had its revenge later as it does. In the early 1990s, Manchester Polytechnic became a university, but by then I didn’t care.
A life spent in educational institutions until the age of 23 – but what did I learn there? In truth, when I look back I think I learned nothing. OK, that’s not true. I learned loads, but all of it was about life. I can’t remember a single academic thing. Not one essay I wrote, not one theory I spewed in and out.
That’s where I have been. Would I do anything different now? Of course, but that’s not the point. It’s all learning. Whether you like it or not, it’s all learning. From the moment you lift your head from the pillow to the moment you lay your head down you are learning. Everything you do in life is about learning. I’m not sure you can do anything without learning from it, whether consciously or unconsciously. Whether you take it on or not, that’s a different thing. And that’s what takes us to the where I am now. I’m Phil Mole.
When I started teaching at Brighton University, that experience in Manchester was invaluable. It was probably – no, definitely – more useful to me than it would have been if I’d have been able to remember what it was Weber said to Durkheim or whatever Derrida’s theories really meant. All that’s useful but what Manchester really told me was that – and this really quite upsetting – my mother was right. You get out what you put in. It’s about passion, about excitement, about enthusiasm – and that’s for both sides of the equation, the people who are teaching and the people who are learning. It’s up to the teacher to make his class swing. That I got nothing out of my class is just as much Phil Mole’s fault as mine. I was absent most of the time, but he should have made his class the hottest ticket in town.
Am I Phil Mole? Is my class the hottest ticket? Maybe. Probably not, but I think knowing it should be is the first step. Learning - education is important. Of course it is. Just like the shark moving forward, you never stop learning. And we all know what happened to the shark that stopped moving forward. Our job is to make that learning as exciting as meeting Jayne Warburton in the bar.
A very long entry - but it seemed to fit
EVALUATE YOUR TEACHING
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans” – John Lennon.
It’s a curious thing. During the period between thinking about this piece and writing it, I saw a film that struck a chord. An unusually staged, wordy film, one of the characters was a teacher – an American political science professor (played by Robert Redford, all warm liberalism, blue denim shirt and brown cord jacket) – who was wrestling with both his role as a teacher and his own sense of purpose. It was all about the choices we make, the impact our decisions have on others, the line we draw in the sand.
Without regurgitating the script, the teacher had arranged to meet a talented but lazy student at 7.30am in his office to talk about why the student had drifted away. How he persuaded a lazy student to come in at 7.30am… is a different question. Anyway.
They sat and talked about life and what it’s for, about the role of the individual in society, about contribution and symbiosis. He didn’t so much haul him over the coals as talk to him about life and responsibility, accountability and maturity. Being a grown up in a society that wasn’t. They talked, they cried, they drank product-placement coffee, they agreed and disagreed and agreed again. Like I say, all warm liberalism, blue denim shirt and cord jacket.
The teacher was a mentor, a brother, a parent, a friend. He was the student’s inspiration, his conscience. It was, of course, a hugely idealised picture – it’s Hollywood, what do you want? - but it did set me thinking. What am I doing? Should I be like that?
Moving swiftly away from the idea of what my students might say if I suggested meeting at 7.30am - and moving even faster away from the idea of getting a cord jacket and blue denim shirt – what was there to learn? Maybe it was time to evaluate my teaching.
"Evaluation is not at heart about collecting evidence to justify oneself, nor about measuring the relative worth of courses and teachers. It is about coming to understand teaching in order to improve student learning."
(Ramsden 1992)
A year ago, the idea of writing a piece entitled “Evaluate Your Teaching” would have been ridiculous. A letter sent to the wrong address. I was a writer, a freelance writer. I’d done a bit of guest lecturing, but that was different. That’s performance. You go in, give a bit show, tell a few war stories and waltz off clutching a cheque. I was, to use a word that has suddenly entered my world, a practitioner. But that was then.
Now I’m a full time lecturer. Not only that, I’m also a student – and that truly is an irony - doing a course called something like How To Become A Proper Teacher and I’m writing an essay about what it’s like to be a teacher. How can I evaluate my teaching if I’m not a teacher? What do you mean I’m a teacher? When did that happen? How did that happen?
A Period Of Self-Reflection
And you may ask yourself “Well...How did I get here?”
I never really intended for this to happen. I didn’t wake up one morning and say to myself “Jed, it’s time to give something back. It’s time to become a teacher”. What happened was this: I woke up one morning and the phone rang. And then I became a teacher. A part-time teacher – a “point five” – for three months.
There was no training, no explanation, no nothing. Just “You start at 10am. They’re second years, you’ll be fine”. It was all true. We did start at 10am, they were second years and I was fine.
I always tell my students “It’s OK. Go ahead and think about career plans and structures and have a goal in mind, but the reality is that you’ll go where the wind blows you, that opportunities will come from the most unexpected sources’. And they all look at me.
Well, my wind blew me to Eastbourne. And – a year later - I’m a full-time permanent member of staff with a pension and a purple car sticker.
I can laugh to myself at all this and stroke my beard and play “I’m a professor” and all that, but to the students this is real. And if it’s real to them, then it’s real to me and it’s time to evaluate my teaching.
The first question is this: Am I a lecturer or a teacher? Give up. No idea. Is there a difference? No idea. Am I a lecturer? God no. The idea that I’m one of those people who stand in front of a lectern in a hall, talking with the aid of maybe Powerpoint presentations of, at least, an overhead projector… Not a chance. Do I teach? Well, I hope so, but I’m not sure that’s the biggest part of it.
I teach the students in the same way that I teach my kids: I tell them about life, about what I’ve learned about life.
A lot of the time I try to be a mixture between Robert Redford (with a few superficial but not, to me, insignificant differences) and a best mate. I was the first lecturer at my School to have a Facebook account, I’m the only lecturer to get invited to their parties. I’m the one who plays Scrabulous online with them.
What I Want
I went to college in Manchester. There were many reasons why I went there. I left Sixth Form College with my A levels and went up to Manchester and went to Manchester Polytechnic. I quite liked the word. Polytechnic. It sounded modern and meaningless, shiny and lacking in any substance. If it had any meaning it was in defining what it wasn’t rather than what it was: it wasn’t a university. That’s what a polytechnic was, not a university. In a sense it fitted in with my story at the time - the playful inverted snob – and I liked the way it meant that I wasn’t like those people, those people who talked about “going to university” as if it was something special.
I didn’t go to Manchester because of anything special. I went to Manchester because I wanted to see The Fall and Joy Division and I didn’t want to go to work. I went to Manchester because they offered me a place. I went to Manchester because I could. Life had its revenge later as it does when, in the early 1990s, Manchester Polytechnic became a university. By then I didn’t care.
I’m not sure I can remember much about college. Philip Morris, who had a motorbike and used to come round to our house all the time. Mick, Roy, the Welsh punk who, according to Friends Reunited now lives in Perth, Australia. Sarah, Paul Tomlin, Peter Monteith, Gas Panic, the Afflecks Palace.
I was, very probably, the worst student in the world. I could get a place on the new ITV show Celebrity Worst Student In The World if there was such a show. Or I was a celebrity. I never went to class, never did what I was supposed to do.
I studied – and I use that word with my tongue so far in my cheek it’s licking my ear – Politics and Sociology, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it now. I couldn’t tell you anything that I did, anything I wrote, anything I read. I couldn’t even tell you the names of my lecturers.
I’m still in touch with Mick, so I called him up. We spoke. I explained my situation and he told me about one of our lecturers called Phil Mole.
“Phil Mole! Are you really telling me you can’t remember him?” he said as the words Phil and Mole hit my ears for, I swear, the first time ever.
“Phil Mole. He…. Had a beard.”
In a sense, I want to be Phil Mole, but I want to be more than that. Phil was good enough to enthuse the second worst student in class. I want to be Phil Mole plus one.
Can I Do It?
It’s all very well wanting to be that Hollywood archetype, the inspiring teacher, but outside of The Dead Poets Society, can it happen?
As part of this course, we are supposed to do a “peer observation” where our teaching is observed and we observe someone else’s teaching. Naturally, we observed each other. The Wisconsin Peer Review website talks about peer review and how it can be done. However… as chance would have it one of the other ‘students’ on this course is not only a fellow Sport Journalism lecturer at Chelsea, but also an old mate.
“Jed’s personal touch was apparent from the outset, the rapport he has with the students admirable and palpable. He creates a relaxed atmosphere conducive to learning and working.
At the start of the session he set the students a task – previewing a football match for a tabloid newspaper and supplying the headline and photo, via Quark Express. The idea of the preview actually came from a student, which demonstrated Jed’s willingness to respond to the class’s desires and hence make the work more suitable. This type of exercise brings them a taste of life in a busy newsroom. The fact that they had only 45 minutes to complete the task gave it an added element of verisimilitude.
Jed’s explanation of what was required was clear and precise. He used large screens at either end of the newsroom (which was packed) to demonstrate what was wanted, resisted overburdening the class with theory, asked if there were any questions, then left the students to their own devices. This in turn meant that he could go round to each student in turn to find out how they were getting on, clarify any issues and give pertinent tips. In turn, the students were not in the least disruptive, and simply got on with their work.
Overall, I felt that this was an ideal approach to the subject. It struck a balance between instruction, practical application, flexibility and professional relevance.”
That was, I felt, a fair appraisal. It was also what I would have wanted to hear. I’m sure that, for the most part, my lectures aren’t a chore. I’m sure that, of all their lectures, mine aren’t the ones they dread.
Hounsell (2003), Gibbs and Habeshaw (1988) and University of Kent (2004) outline a range of ideas for getting feedback from students. My feedback has come from rather more unorthodox routes, but I feel that they are just as valid – if not more so.
When my initial part time contract ended, I had to re-apply for the permanent position. I applied, got short-listed and had an interview. It was then that I found out that the students had signed a petition asking that I be given the job.
The M&E (Module and Evaluation) forms that the students fill in at the end of the year were positive, too. These forms – written anonymously, supposedly unseen by lecturers – are the nearest thing the students have to a right of reply. I skirted the rules and had a look and, generally, the students were very positive.
Further evidence that the students like my classes came last week. A senior lecturer appeared in my course leaders office, face like thunder. In his hand he had a piece of paper with a list of names of students who had repeatedly been missing his classes. “What’s happened to these students?” he demanded to know. “Have they left?”
I was a little embarrassed – and OK, a little smug – to explain that they were all in the newsroom writing a paper for me as we spoke.
But Is It Any Good?
So OK, great. We get on and they like me. It might even mean that maybe – just maybe – I might get to be their Phil Mole. But does that mean my lectures are any good? Does all that mean though that my lectures are the ones that are the most use? That’s a different question.
The communication part of the job is, for me, easy Chatting and getting on with people. The subject matter also makes it easy. I teach News Writing, Advanced Sports Journalism and Multi Media Journalism. These are the practical modules, the ones where students get to do the things that they signed up to do back when they were school kids. We watch football matches and write match reports – not hard work, whichever way you bend it
We talk, we chat, we play. To use the student word of the moment, we banter. We make fun of each other, we tease each other. I make fun of their shoes, they make fun of mine. I don’t know if what I do is any good.
I never formally trained to be a teacher. I never even gave it any thought. It was all
“Here are the keys to the car. Off you go”.
“Lovely, thanks. What are those pedals for?”
Whoooosshhhh. Crrrrrraaaaassssshhhhhh.
“Oh, I see. That’s what happens when you do that.”
I made it up as I went along. I had – I have – the advantage of teaching something that I’ve spent the best part of 20 years doing, so I know the subject. What I don’t know – or what I’m not sure about – is how to teach.
Going back to the Redford film, it showed the bright but lazy student in the first year when he was simply a bright student. We saw Redford giving a lecture about drug addicts and talking about clinics where junkies could be given methodone to help them with their addiction. This was held up as the action of a responsible, caring society. All the students nodded in agreement. All except the bright student who said “That’s ridiculous. You might as well have state-sponsored drunkard’s lanes on the highways!” Apart from the fact that it’s a fantastically stupid thing to say and if this was an example of the bright student’s brightness then God help the stupid students…
Anyway. It was what followed that struck me. There was a vigorous, discussion where students were engaged with each other and the subject. People were getting angry, throwing opinions around, caring, being erudite, informed, passionate.
Would anything like that happen in one of my classes? Hang about a minute – I’ll go and ask that pig flying past the window.
The Other Stuff
I heard someone – a quite senior lecturer – say the other day “This job would be easy if it wasn’t for the students”. It was possibly meant as a joke, but then again… possibly not. I feel completely the opposite. It’s the other stuff - the stuff that happens around the students – that weighs heavy.
Marking weighs me down .I’m not experienced enough to do it quickly – to drive through the shortcuts – and so it takes a ridiculously long time. So I don’t get enough done. And the more I don’t get enough done… the further behind I fall. The students see this and, while we get round it because we’re mates an have a laugh, it’s not as good as it should be. Again, it cuts both ways. I know at I put a lot more into my work than others, but because I haven’t been doing this very long and I’m still writing my lecture notes as I’m going along and… and… and… it takes me a long time.
The consequence is that I don’t give things enough time – because there isn’t enough time. I don’t give individuals enough time. I don’t give this course enough time.
While a lot of that is down to time management and recognising how long things take – something that only experience tells us - there’s a more fundamental truth going on, too. I’m a journalism lecturer and, a lot of the time, if I’m being completely honest, I don’t know what I’m marking. OK, there are a group of students who, frankly, I wouldn’t trust to write a shopping list. “Is that really how you spell carrot?” But mostly, it’s OK. What they do is OK.
I’ve always been of the opinion that writing is an expressive form and that the right to say “This is good but that’s bad” is a dubious right at best. Clearly, the way that I write is best but to question – or worse, mark down – Student A because he or she doesn’t write or phrase things like I might is plain daft.
There’s a clear chasm between “that’s good” and “that’s no good”, but outside that? It’s a tough call. So I make up the difference by trying to inspire them. For example, there has recently been a Radio 4 series about newspapers, where they’ve been and where they’re going. I taped the shows, talked to the students about them and made the tapes available. Understanding the context, the history, the famous names… it’s all part of the job but at the same time, it’s not something that anyone else does.
It also bothers me that I’ve never been taught to be a teacher. Before I started this job… we’re going back a few years. I know how to write a feature, but do I know why I do what I do? Mostly I just do it. One of the modules I teach – multi-media – I’m only marginally more enlightened than the students. And even that’s not always true.
What helps me is that I have a credibility in their eyes in that I’ve been where they want to go, I’ve done what they want to do, I’ve been a successful sports journalist.
Conclusion - Where Do We Go From Here?
When I came to prepare for this essay, I gathered a number of evaluative documents regarding my course, for example Module Reports, an External Examiner’s Report and an Academic Health Report for both my area (Sport and Leisure Cultures) and the Chelsea School.
Hounsell (2003) points to four forms of feedback – self-generated, from students, from colleagues and incidental, which refers to other factors such as attendance. I feel I’ve dealt with all these forms, albeit in a discursive way, and feel that my teaching is improving as a result.
It’s a curious thing, but the process of this PgCLTHE course has also helped enormously. I got to know other lecturers from other schools and others disciplines and it was a fantastic relief to find out that, by and large, we were all concerned about the same things. Same things, different names.
While I’m still a long way from the Robert Redford character in that film – the inspiring mentor, the wise elder statesman, the cross between a teacher and a parent and a mate and a lover – I feel that I’m getting there.
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans” – John Lennon.
It’s a curious thing. During the period between thinking about this piece and writing it, I saw a film that struck a chord. An unusually staged, wordy film, one of the characters was a teacher – an American political science professor (played by Robert Redford, all warm liberalism, blue denim shirt and brown cord jacket) – who was wrestling with both his role as a teacher and his own sense of purpose. It was all about the choices we make, the impact our decisions have on others, the line we draw in the sand.
Without regurgitating the script, the teacher had arranged to meet a talented but lazy student at 7.30am in his office to talk about why the student had drifted away. How he persuaded a lazy student to come in at 7.30am… is a different question. Anyway.
They sat and talked about life and what it’s for, about the role of the individual in society, about contribution and symbiosis. He didn’t so much haul him over the coals as talk to him about life and responsibility, accountability and maturity. Being a grown up in a society that wasn’t. They talked, they cried, they drank product-placement coffee, they agreed and disagreed and agreed again. Like I say, all warm liberalism, blue denim shirt and cord jacket.
The teacher was a mentor, a brother, a parent, a friend. He was the student’s inspiration, his conscience. It was, of course, a hugely idealised picture – it’s Hollywood, what do you want? - but it did set me thinking. What am I doing? Should I be like that?
Moving swiftly away from the idea of what my students might say if I suggested meeting at 7.30am - and moving even faster away from the idea of getting a cord jacket and blue denim shirt – what was there to learn? Maybe it was time to evaluate my teaching.
"Evaluation is not at heart about collecting evidence to justify oneself, nor about measuring the relative worth of courses and teachers. It is about coming to understand teaching in order to improve student learning."
(Ramsden 1992)
A year ago, the idea of writing a piece entitled “Evaluate Your Teaching” would have been ridiculous. A letter sent to the wrong address. I was a writer, a freelance writer. I’d done a bit of guest lecturing, but that was different. That’s performance. You go in, give a bit show, tell a few war stories and waltz off clutching a cheque. I was, to use a word that has suddenly entered my world, a practitioner. But that was then.
Now I’m a full time lecturer. Not only that, I’m also a student – and that truly is an irony - doing a course called something like How To Become A Proper Teacher and I’m writing an essay about what it’s like to be a teacher. How can I evaluate my teaching if I’m not a teacher? What do you mean I’m a teacher? When did that happen? How did that happen?
A Period Of Self-Reflection
And you may ask yourself “Well...How did I get here?”
I never really intended for this to happen. I didn’t wake up one morning and say to myself “Jed, it’s time to give something back. It’s time to become a teacher”. What happened was this: I woke up one morning and the phone rang. And then I became a teacher. A part-time teacher – a “point five” – for three months.
There was no training, no explanation, no nothing. Just “You start at 10am. They’re second years, you’ll be fine”. It was all true. We did start at 10am, they were second years and I was fine.
I always tell my students “It’s OK. Go ahead and think about career plans and structures and have a goal in mind, but the reality is that you’ll go where the wind blows you, that opportunities will come from the most unexpected sources’. And they all look at me.
Well, my wind blew me to Eastbourne. And – a year later - I’m a full-time permanent member of staff with a pension and a purple car sticker.
I can laugh to myself at all this and stroke my beard and play “I’m a professor” and all that, but to the students this is real. And if it’s real to them, then it’s real to me and it’s time to evaluate my teaching.
The first question is this: Am I a lecturer or a teacher? Give up. No idea. Is there a difference? No idea. Am I a lecturer? God no. The idea that I’m one of those people who stand in front of a lectern in a hall, talking with the aid of maybe Powerpoint presentations of, at least, an overhead projector… Not a chance. Do I teach? Well, I hope so, but I’m not sure that’s the biggest part of it.
I teach the students in the same way that I teach my kids: I tell them about life, about what I’ve learned about life.
A lot of the time I try to be a mixture between Robert Redford (with a few superficial but not, to me, insignificant differences) and a best mate. I was the first lecturer at my School to have a Facebook account, I’m the only lecturer to get invited to their parties. I’m the one who plays Scrabulous online with them.
What I Want
I went to college in Manchester. There were many reasons why I went there. I left Sixth Form College with my A levels and went up to Manchester and went to Manchester Polytechnic. I quite liked the word. Polytechnic. It sounded modern and meaningless, shiny and lacking in any substance. If it had any meaning it was in defining what it wasn’t rather than what it was: it wasn’t a university. That’s what a polytechnic was, not a university. In a sense it fitted in with my story at the time - the playful inverted snob – and I liked the way it meant that I wasn’t like those people, those people who talked about “going to university” as if it was something special.
I didn’t go to Manchester because of anything special. I went to Manchester because I wanted to see The Fall and Joy Division and I didn’t want to go to work. I went to Manchester because they offered me a place. I went to Manchester because I could. Life had its revenge later as it does when, in the early 1990s, Manchester Polytechnic became a university. By then I didn’t care.
I’m not sure I can remember much about college. Philip Morris, who had a motorbike and used to come round to our house all the time. Mick, Roy, the Welsh punk who, according to Friends Reunited now lives in Perth, Australia. Sarah, Paul Tomlin, Peter Monteith, Gas Panic, the Afflecks Palace.
I was, very probably, the worst student in the world. I could get a place on the new ITV show Celebrity Worst Student In The World if there was such a show. Or I was a celebrity. I never went to class, never did what I was supposed to do.
I studied – and I use that word with my tongue so far in my cheek it’s licking my ear – Politics and Sociology, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it now. I couldn’t tell you anything that I did, anything I wrote, anything I read. I couldn’t even tell you the names of my lecturers.
I’m still in touch with Mick, so I called him up. We spoke. I explained my situation and he told me about one of our lecturers called Phil Mole.
“Phil Mole! Are you really telling me you can’t remember him?” he said as the words Phil and Mole hit my ears for, I swear, the first time ever.
“Phil Mole. He…. Had a beard.”
In a sense, I want to be Phil Mole, but I want to be more than that. Phil was good enough to enthuse the second worst student in class. I want to be Phil Mole plus one.
Can I Do It?
It’s all very well wanting to be that Hollywood archetype, the inspiring teacher, but outside of The Dead Poets Society, can it happen?
As part of this course, we are supposed to do a “peer observation” where our teaching is observed and we observe someone else’s teaching. Naturally, we observed each other. The Wisconsin Peer Review website talks about peer review and how it can be done. However… as chance would have it one of the other ‘students’ on this course is not only a fellow Sport Journalism lecturer at Chelsea, but also an old mate.
“Jed’s personal touch was apparent from the outset, the rapport he has with the students admirable and palpable. He creates a relaxed atmosphere conducive to learning and working.
At the start of the session he set the students a task – previewing a football match for a tabloid newspaper and supplying the headline and photo, via Quark Express. The idea of the preview actually came from a student, which demonstrated Jed’s willingness to respond to the class’s desires and hence make the work more suitable. This type of exercise brings them a taste of life in a busy newsroom. The fact that they had only 45 minutes to complete the task gave it an added element of verisimilitude.
Jed’s explanation of what was required was clear and precise. He used large screens at either end of the newsroom (which was packed) to demonstrate what was wanted, resisted overburdening the class with theory, asked if there were any questions, then left the students to their own devices. This in turn meant that he could go round to each student in turn to find out how they were getting on, clarify any issues and give pertinent tips. In turn, the students were not in the least disruptive, and simply got on with their work.
Overall, I felt that this was an ideal approach to the subject. It struck a balance between instruction, practical application, flexibility and professional relevance.”
That was, I felt, a fair appraisal. It was also what I would have wanted to hear. I’m sure that, for the most part, my lectures aren’t a chore. I’m sure that, of all their lectures, mine aren’t the ones they dread.
Hounsell (2003), Gibbs and Habeshaw (1988) and University of Kent (2004) outline a range of ideas for getting feedback from students. My feedback has come from rather more unorthodox routes, but I feel that they are just as valid – if not more so.
When my initial part time contract ended, I had to re-apply for the permanent position. I applied, got short-listed and had an interview. It was then that I found out that the students had signed a petition asking that I be given the job.
The M&E (Module and Evaluation) forms that the students fill in at the end of the year were positive, too. These forms – written anonymously, supposedly unseen by lecturers – are the nearest thing the students have to a right of reply. I skirted the rules and had a look and, generally, the students were very positive.
Further evidence that the students like my classes came last week. A senior lecturer appeared in my course leaders office, face like thunder. In his hand he had a piece of paper with a list of names of students who had repeatedly been missing his classes. “What’s happened to these students?” he demanded to know. “Have they left?”
I was a little embarrassed – and OK, a little smug – to explain that they were all in the newsroom writing a paper for me as we spoke.
But Is It Any Good?
So OK, great. We get on and they like me. It might even mean that maybe – just maybe – I might get to be their Phil Mole. But does that mean my lectures are any good? Does all that mean though that my lectures are the ones that are the most use? That’s a different question.
The communication part of the job is, for me, easy Chatting and getting on with people. The subject matter also makes it easy. I teach News Writing, Advanced Sports Journalism and Multi Media Journalism. These are the practical modules, the ones where students get to do the things that they signed up to do back when they were school kids. We watch football matches and write match reports – not hard work, whichever way you bend it
We talk, we chat, we play. To use the student word of the moment, we banter. We make fun of each other, we tease each other. I make fun of their shoes, they make fun of mine. I don’t know if what I do is any good.
I never formally trained to be a teacher. I never even gave it any thought. It was all
“Here are the keys to the car. Off you go”.
“Lovely, thanks. What are those pedals for?”
Whoooosshhhh. Crrrrrraaaaassssshhhhhh.
“Oh, I see. That’s what happens when you do that.”
I made it up as I went along. I had – I have – the advantage of teaching something that I’ve spent the best part of 20 years doing, so I know the subject. What I don’t know – or what I’m not sure about – is how to teach.
Going back to the Redford film, it showed the bright but lazy student in the first year when he was simply a bright student. We saw Redford giving a lecture about drug addicts and talking about clinics where junkies could be given methodone to help them with their addiction. This was held up as the action of a responsible, caring society. All the students nodded in agreement. All except the bright student who said “That’s ridiculous. You might as well have state-sponsored drunkard’s lanes on the highways!” Apart from the fact that it’s a fantastically stupid thing to say and if this was an example of the bright student’s brightness then God help the stupid students…
Anyway. It was what followed that struck me. There was a vigorous, discussion where students were engaged with each other and the subject. People were getting angry, throwing opinions around, caring, being erudite, informed, passionate.
Would anything like that happen in one of my classes? Hang about a minute – I’ll go and ask that pig flying past the window.
The Other Stuff
I heard someone – a quite senior lecturer – say the other day “This job would be easy if it wasn’t for the students”. It was possibly meant as a joke, but then again… possibly not. I feel completely the opposite. It’s the other stuff - the stuff that happens around the students – that weighs heavy.
Marking weighs me down .I’m not experienced enough to do it quickly – to drive through the shortcuts – and so it takes a ridiculously long time. So I don’t get enough done. And the more I don’t get enough done… the further behind I fall. The students see this and, while we get round it because we’re mates an have a laugh, it’s not as good as it should be. Again, it cuts both ways. I know at I put a lot more into my work than others, but because I haven’t been doing this very long and I’m still writing my lecture notes as I’m going along and… and… and… it takes me a long time.
The consequence is that I don’t give things enough time – because there isn’t enough time. I don’t give individuals enough time. I don’t give this course enough time.
While a lot of that is down to time management and recognising how long things take – something that only experience tells us - there’s a more fundamental truth going on, too. I’m a journalism lecturer and, a lot of the time, if I’m being completely honest, I don’t know what I’m marking. OK, there are a group of students who, frankly, I wouldn’t trust to write a shopping list. “Is that really how you spell carrot?” But mostly, it’s OK. What they do is OK.
I’ve always been of the opinion that writing is an expressive form and that the right to say “This is good but that’s bad” is a dubious right at best. Clearly, the way that I write is best but to question – or worse, mark down – Student A because he or she doesn’t write or phrase things like I might is plain daft.
There’s a clear chasm between “that’s good” and “that’s no good”, but outside that? It’s a tough call. So I make up the difference by trying to inspire them. For example, there has recently been a Radio 4 series about newspapers, where they’ve been and where they’re going. I taped the shows, talked to the students about them and made the tapes available. Understanding the context, the history, the famous names… it’s all part of the job but at the same time, it’s not something that anyone else does.
It also bothers me that I’ve never been taught to be a teacher. Before I started this job… we’re going back a few years. I know how to write a feature, but do I know why I do what I do? Mostly I just do it. One of the modules I teach – multi-media – I’m only marginally more enlightened than the students. And even that’s not always true.
What helps me is that I have a credibility in their eyes in that I’ve been where they want to go, I’ve done what they want to do, I’ve been a successful sports journalist.
Conclusion - Where Do We Go From Here?
When I came to prepare for this essay, I gathered a number of evaluative documents regarding my course, for example Module Reports, an External Examiner’s Report and an Academic Health Report for both my area (Sport and Leisure Cultures) and the Chelsea School.
Hounsell (2003) points to four forms of feedback – self-generated, from students, from colleagues and incidental, which refers to other factors such as attendance. I feel I’ve dealt with all these forms, albeit in a discursive way, and feel that my teaching is improving as a result.
It’s a curious thing, but the process of this PgCLTHE course has also helped enormously. I got to know other lecturers from other schools and others disciplines and it was a fantastic relief to find out that, by and large, we were all concerned about the same things. Same things, different names.
While I’m still a long way from the Robert Redford character in that film – the inspiring mentor, the wise elder statesman, the cross between a teacher and a parent and a mate and a lover – I feel that I’m getting there.
Monday, 5 October 2009
DAY ONE
Day One. The teaching starts. We've just had a weekend in Wales with The Bionic Woman, the rabble are about to lurch into view, and at home the cracks are getting bigger. Between now and Christmas, that'll be interesting. Might go and hang out with Cow and Bully next door.
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
A trip to London town with Ellie and Hannah and Kim to see Wicked! – Ellie’s 14th birthday present. Last year was a bit of a washout for the girl – the big 13th which had been talked about f’rages and which we’d all looked forward to f’reven more ages was kinda hijacked by my mother. Not really her fault, mind. And given the choice I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t have chosen August 18, 2008, to die. I’m fairly sure that given the choice, she’d have popped off – “sat at the top of a big slide and just,,, slide away” as she once put it – a couple of years before that. But she wasn’t given the choice and whoever it was who did have the choice, whoever it was who did the choosing, they chose two days before Belle’s birthday. And Jews being Jews and not wanting to hang around with these things, the funeral was two days later on August 20. Ellie’s actual birthday. That went down well. Actually, given that most 13-year olds are egos on legs, I thought she dealt with it remarkably well. Suddenly she was shifted from thinking about me and what I want and how much they’re going to spend on me and me and me and me… suddenly she had to think about someone else.
So we’ve had all the lines, all the gags. It was a wicked idea. They’ll have a wicked time. And they will. Right now they’ll be high on Haribo and having the time of their lives. And rightly so.
A Blog entry. Blimey. The last Blog entry was FA Cup Final day and I remember responding to Adam Clark’s mail about being in the press box at Wembley. I remember thinking that it should be kinda confronting – at least a little bit of the “What am I doing? Where did it all go wrong?” stuff should have been floating around. I remember even writing the Blog as a two-parter, to try to encourage myself to follow it up. But that didn’t work. Well, it didn’t then – so I’m going to follow it up now.
So. Yes, I would have liked to have been in the Press Box at Wembley on FA Cup Final day. But – and this is the key thing – not because it was FA Cup Final day. Because it was The Big Thing that was happening that day. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been The Biggest Party. Or The Horse Of The Year Show. Or anything at all. It goes back to that childish desire to be at the best party in town. The thing is that all the stuff that goes to support you being in the Press Box, all the work you have to do, all that fills my head with dread.
You see, unless you’re the bloke giving out the medals you’ve got to make a pact with The Devil. You only get to go to Wembley if you’re prepared to go to Derby on Tuesday or Bolton on Saturday. And not just once, you’ve got to do that all year. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything worse. Being a football columnist, someone who stays at home and pontificates about the state of the game. That I’ll do. The get your hands dirty, day-to-day stuff? Not on your nelly.
There’s another reason, a more heartfelt reason. The reason I was watching the game at all was that I was killing the hours until it was time to go to pick LouLou up from whatever party she was at. And that’s what I want to spend my life doing. Being a football writer? Well that would just get in the way of all the good stuff in life.
What I’d really like is a job where they paid me to stand up in front of Young Impressionable Minds and tell them what I think. But where on earth would you find a job like that?
So we’ve had all the lines, all the gags. It was a wicked idea. They’ll have a wicked time. And they will. Right now they’ll be high on Haribo and having the time of their lives. And rightly so.
A Blog entry. Blimey. The last Blog entry was FA Cup Final day and I remember responding to Adam Clark’s mail about being in the press box at Wembley. I remember thinking that it should be kinda confronting – at least a little bit of the “What am I doing? Where did it all go wrong?” stuff should have been floating around. I remember even writing the Blog as a two-parter, to try to encourage myself to follow it up. But that didn’t work. Well, it didn’t then – so I’m going to follow it up now.
So. Yes, I would have liked to have been in the Press Box at Wembley on FA Cup Final day. But – and this is the key thing – not because it was FA Cup Final day. Because it was The Big Thing that was happening that day. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been The Biggest Party. Or The Horse Of The Year Show. Or anything at all. It goes back to that childish desire to be at the best party in town. The thing is that all the stuff that goes to support you being in the Press Box, all the work you have to do, all that fills my head with dread.
You see, unless you’re the bloke giving out the medals you’ve got to make a pact with The Devil. You only get to go to Wembley if you’re prepared to go to Derby on Tuesday or Bolton on Saturday. And not just once, you’ve got to do that all year. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything worse. Being a football columnist, someone who stays at home and pontificates about the state of the game. That I’ll do. The get your hands dirty, day-to-day stuff? Not on your nelly.
There’s another reason, a more heartfelt reason. The reason I was watching the game at all was that I was killing the hours until it was time to go to pick LouLou up from whatever party she was at. And that’s what I want to spend my life doing. Being a football writer? Well that would just get in the way of all the good stuff in life.
What I’d really like is a job where they paid me to stand up in front of Young Impressionable Minds and tell them what I think. But where on earth would you find a job like that?
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Living The Dream
On Saturday afternoon this happened. I was at home by myself. Gill was off on some thing somewhere (I daresay she’s written a blog about it), and I was at home by myself (and now I’m writing a blog about it. Maybe one day Gill and I will cease to exist and simply be blog-entities.) Anyway, I’d just taken the girls to the Lodge to go to the swimming pool and I was at home marking. And then this happened. I logged on to Facebook because I was supposed to be marking and therefore it was essential I log on to Facebook. And then this happened. An alert (or whatever it is they’re called) popped up.
Person X is in the Wembley press box, living the dream
Now then Person X (and I’m keeping Adam’s name secret because it’s polite) is an ex-student, a very good one. I once gave him 90% for something which everyone else thought was mad but I thought “Actually, no. It’s good, really good. So I’m going to reward it.”
Anyway, when Person X left college he got a job with Everton even though he was from Devon and was therefore a mad Liverpool fan and by all accounts was doing rather well. To be honest, I hope he doesn’t do too well and get settled because I think he’s got it in him to become a journalist. I want him to get a job on a paper because I think he could do some proper writing.
Anyway, the other thing I didn’t say was that Saturday was the FA Cup final and Everton was in it. Against Chelsea. That’s no pleasure. In the FA Cup final against Leyton Orient, that’s a pleasure. Against Chelsea, if you’re Everton that’s called making up the numbers.
Anyway, so Person X is in the press box at Wembley Stadium at the FA Cup final, living the dream. And this is less than a year after he left college. That’s living the dream and then some.
So I go this Facebook alert and I wrote back:
“I’m sitting here marking SJ300 and you’re in the press box at Wembley. Ever got the feeling that something’s wrong but you can’t quite your finger on what?”
Default sarcasm, but it did make me pause for thought. Was I a bit jealous? Would I want to be at Wembley in the press box living the dream instead of in my study marking SJ300s?
Person X is in the Wembley press box, living the dream
Now then Person X (and I’m keeping Adam’s name secret because it’s polite) is an ex-student, a very good one. I once gave him 90% for something which everyone else thought was mad but I thought “Actually, no. It’s good, really good. So I’m going to reward it.”
Anyway, when Person X left college he got a job with Everton even though he was from Devon and was therefore a mad Liverpool fan and by all accounts was doing rather well. To be honest, I hope he doesn’t do too well and get settled because I think he’s got it in him to become a journalist. I want him to get a job on a paper because I think he could do some proper writing.
Anyway, the other thing I didn’t say was that Saturday was the FA Cup final and Everton was in it. Against Chelsea. That’s no pleasure. In the FA Cup final against Leyton Orient, that’s a pleasure. Against Chelsea, if you’re Everton that’s called making up the numbers.
Anyway, so Person X is in the press box at Wembley Stadium at the FA Cup final, living the dream. And this is less than a year after he left college. That’s living the dream and then some.
So I go this Facebook alert and I wrote back:
“I’m sitting here marking SJ300 and you’re in the press box at Wembley. Ever got the feeling that something’s wrong but you can’t quite your finger on what?”
Default sarcasm, but it did make me pause for thought. Was I a bit jealous? Would I want to be at Wembley in the press box living the dream instead of in my study marking SJ300s?
Thursday, 16 April 2009
It’s a fantastic idea
I’m going to write a book where all the lead characters have the same names as the literary critics of the major papers and magazines. They’ll all be fantastically good looking, rich, charismatic… the beautiful people. Journalists – critics especially – are all ego monsters. All that “I think this” and “I think that.” The idea that they are paid to give their opinions, how could they not be? I’m going to call it “Jade: My Story”. It’s a belt-and-braces thing here. You have a look in any bookshop and that’s all there is: books by Jade, books about Jade, books by Jade about Jade. Bless her and all, but all you’ve got to do is put her name on the cover and… well, she’s not going to complain is she? Max Clifford might but I figure as long as you don’t put a surname to it… could be any old Jade.
I’m growing to love my new phone. Very touchy feely, all that fingers across the screen stuff. I can’t actually make any calls on it yet but I think sometimes we ask too much of technology. I’m sitting here on the train, we’re flying through the beautiful countryside and I’m listening to The Bays – my still new favourite band. What could be finer? I had been feeling a little jaded but a bit of The Bays….
Jaded. That’s it. The title of my new book. Jaded. Actually, I’ve been thinking. By the time I’ve finished the book – about 20 years time at the current rate. No, by the time I’ve finished the book and the thing comes out we’re talking about what? 18 months? Easy. No one will have a clue who Jade is, sorry was. It’ll be lost. She, bless her and all, won’t even be a footnote. What I need to do is think of the next Jade – or maybe the Jade of about three Jade’s time. 18 months? That’s about three Jades, no? six months is possibly a bit generous, but hey, let’s go easy one her.
Hayward’s Heath. Home of the good idea. And I’ve got the good idea. We’ll call the book “Gordon Brown: My Story”. About as much chance as Spurs winning the Champions League.
I’m growing to love my new phone. Very touchy feely, all that fingers across the screen stuff. I can’t actually make any calls on it yet but I think sometimes we ask too much of technology. I’m sitting here on the train, we’re flying through the beautiful countryside and I’m listening to The Bays – my still new favourite band. What could be finer? I had been feeling a little jaded but a bit of The Bays….
Jaded. That’s it. The title of my new book. Jaded. Actually, I’ve been thinking. By the time I’ve finished the book – about 20 years time at the current rate. No, by the time I’ve finished the book and the thing comes out we’re talking about what? 18 months? Easy. No one will have a clue who Jade is, sorry was. It’ll be lost. She, bless her and all, won’t even be a footnote. What I need to do is think of the next Jade – or maybe the Jade of about three Jade’s time. 18 months? That’s about three Jades, no? six months is possibly a bit generous, but hey, let’s go easy one her.
Hayward’s Heath. Home of the good idea. And I’ve got the good idea. We’ll call the book “Gordon Brown: My Story”. About as much chance as Spurs winning the Champions League.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Modern Life
Blimey. It's not even 11am and already I'm done in. I've got three blogs, a Facebook account to maintain and now I've got 11 people following me on Twitter. And they're all waiting for me to do something interesting. But I haven't got time to do anything cos I'm too busy telling people what I'm doing.
Life used to be so much simpler. Should I have a Curly Wurly or some Spangles? That used to be life's biggest dilemma. Last night I tried to watch some telly. By the time I finished checking out what was on it was time to go to bed.
In the time it’s taken me to write that I’ve got another three followers. That’s eight. It’s hard not to feel a bit Life of Brian. What do they want, these people?
Now Martino has told me that there’s this thing called 12 Seconds where you post up 12 seconds of video footage of yourself twice a day. Why 12 seconds? Because anything more than that it boring. Already 140 characters – including spaces – is boring.
Life used to be so much simpler. Should I have a Curly Wurly or some Spangles? That used to be life's biggest dilemma. Last night I tried to watch some telly. By the time I finished checking out what was on it was time to go to bed.
In the time it’s taken me to write that I’ve got another three followers. That’s eight. It’s hard not to feel a bit Life of Brian. What do they want, these people?
Now Martino has told me that there’s this thing called 12 Seconds where you post up 12 seconds of video footage of yourself twice a day. Why 12 seconds? Because anything more than that it boring. Already 140 characters – including spaces – is boring.
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Chapter 4
I was exactly the kind of guy who’d be seen at a place like this. It's 4.15pm and it's Sunday. Outside the rain is drizzling like it wants to rain but can't be bothered. Limbs ache, wishing they were 22 and not 32 and I feel like whatever it is I've been doing, well maybe it's about time I stopped doing it. The grief is that I know that if I feel like this next week, it will be a bonus. A right result, as we might have once said. The coffee I've been waiting for still feels like the first of the day, even though it's the third (or maybe fourth) cup of the day. Or maybe not even the first. Next comes the toast. It was only an idea to eat. Sustenance. As far as ideas go, it wasn't a bad one. Ideas.
“Did you order me a coffee?”
Alison. She looked how I felt. Actually if I looked how I felt I’d be happy.
I stopped writing and looked up. Good. She looked how I felt and though I probably also looked how I felt, it made things seem so much better. Loneliness is a terrible thing.
“This bread… it’s something else” I said to her. “It’s your worst white slice nightmare. It looks like a real loaf of bread but there’s nothing there. It’s air and water. Where’s the flour? Where’s the yeast? Where’s the…”
“The soul. Go on, say it. Where’s the soul. Then, when you say that, you can have a bit of a rabbit about how it’s a reflection of Japanese society. Looks good, contains nothing.”
“And bread is the food of life and… “
“Yeah yeah. Bollocks bollocks bollocks. Did you order me a coffee?”
“Of course I ordered you a coffee. You asked me to order coffee, so I ordered coffee.”
“Good. I guess it’s that empty cup there.”
I smiled and she smiled. A familiar scene.
“If I order myself another one then you can have it. We’ll be quits then.”
“OK. So if you do that, I’ll order you another one and you’ll still owe me. You know I like it that way.” We’d talked ourselves into a corner neither of us knew much about and neither of us cared about and there wasn’t anything to do but drink the coffees. Somehow on a day like this, writing gibberish letters to people who’d know nothing of their contents seemed a suitable task.
Our coffees came and the relief that they brought dried up the conversation. Part of the relief. So we drank our coffee and looked at the toast which seemed no more appealing now than it had done when it was first brought over. Big thick lumps of bread. Sometimes the idea of food is better than the food. Maybe one day I’ll find a restaurant where you can order food and you don’t eat it and you don’t pay for it. You could order wild vegetable dishes or exotic and body distressing local specialities without having to endure the eating or the next day grief. A few coffees later and we’d got no further.
So now the rain was coming down. The rain in Tokyo is different to the rain anywhere else. It creates a mirror everywhere. The cars, all clean and shiny reflect against the shop windows which are all clean and bright and they both throw back the reflection of the garish neon which exists in even the sidest of side streets so that everything reflects on everything else and into everything else. Vetrification they call it in the floor cleaning game. You know those floors made of marble slab tiles that are impossibly shiny and sparkly? That’s vetrification. They lay ordinary marble and take the top layer off it with a major wire wool rotating brush so that it all clean. Like a reptile constantly shedding its skin. Like Tokyo.
I’d probably go through the old Apocalypse Now thing if Alison hadn’t beaten me to it.
“Tokyo. Shit” she said.
I was just thinking that. Martin Sheen and helicopter fans. Tokyo. Shit.
“When I was there I couldn’t wait to get out. When I was out, all I could think about was how to get back there,” I said in my best Martin Sheen voice. His own mother wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference if she’d had been sitting in her own bedroom. My mazel, it would probably turn out that she lived somewhere closer than Japan.
“What?”
“Apocal ... nah, doesn’t matter. You just got up?” I said.
“If I’d had got as far down so I needed to get up I wouldn’t have been able to get up at all.”
I only knew what that meant because I felt the same way myself. That old ACE feeling.
“So what’s the story then. Letters day?” she said. “Yeah, it’s important to keep in touch with the old life.”
--------------
One slice, maybe two inches thick and cut into three pieces, like cubes of hot bread or angular doorsteps. I tear into it lethargically - biting is impossible. My mouth is the wrong shape.
Around me in the cafe, people are sitting reading the papers. And the scene is the same as everywhere else in the world. They are turned to the sports pages, checking to see how their boys have done.
Everyone has their tales of glory, their tales of woe. “He’s an ordinary geezer, doesn’t seem to have any grief”. But it’s not true. Everyone has their grief. Well, everyone here does anyway. Everybody everywhere does. Family grief. Parental grief. Boy grief. Girl grief. Body grief. Mind grief. Grief grief.
Another cigarette. Having another cigarette wasn’t so much a decision as a move designed to put off having to make a decision because you know any other decision will probably be wrong and definitely not really worth the effort.
Last night. About last night. There was an acronym - A.C.E. – we used which made us laugh anyway. We’re going to have an ace night. A night out in the company of acid, cocaine and ecstasy. A.C.E. Last night was supposed to be ace. But then every night is supposed to be ace. It got blown out of the water when Mark came in with some smack. That added an ‘H’ - and all we were left with was an ache. But, it’s getting better.
--------------------------------------------
More coffee arrives. People carrying umbrellas walk past. I’m wearing a pink sweatshirt cut off just above the elbow. It is emblazoned with the legend “Chanel - Paris” but no one can see it because it’s inside out. On my legs are a pair of Thai fisherman’s trousers held up by a brown leather belt. My shoes are local specialities called Jika Tabi - black canvas boots which fasten at the back with maybe 15 hook and eye things and which the big toe separated like a foot mitten. They are very comfortable and to your eyes, a little eccentric. The whole ensemble is what you might call ‘witty’. Last night was still here...
..." "Don't let me stop you." So I wrote "... waiting for another coffee" and put my pen down again. You know where you stand with creativity.
------------------
About last night. I remember the way I used to go out. Say, for example, I was supposed to go out at 10. I’d have a bath at 6, a long bath, wash my hair and spend the next two hours poodling around doing my hair and sorting out which clothes to wear. Where were we going? What type of people were going to be there? What impression did I want to create? Did I want a friend for a night? A job? A serious friend? A serious job? I had a suit for each and knew exactly which one would do for each need. The fact that they were all black and baggy and double breasted and made by the same geezer mattered not a jot to anyone but me. I knew and I felt right in each one in a different way. That took me up to about 8ish. Then I’d spend some time on the phone, checking out what the score really was and then I’d spend the next 30 or 40 minutes changing the suit to meet the new requirement. Five minutes before leaving the house, I’d change back to the suit that I always wore. The black baggy one. Dependable and comfortable. Sometimes I’d lay three or four out on my bed, each with a tie and compare and go through different combinations.
Here, things are a bit different. No, maybe that’s misleading. They’re not really different. There isn’t the clothing dilemma, largely because there are no clothes to speak of. How can you deliberate about which suit to wear when you’ve only got one suit? So what do you do? You end up trying to change your inside because you can’t change your outside. Drugs is the new deal. The questions are the old questions. Where were we going? What type of people were going to be there? What impression did I want to create? Did I want a friend for a night, a job, a serious friend? A tab of acid? Maybe a speed cap and half a tab? And a line of coke. A little bit of ketamine. Take half a tab now and half when you get there. And more speed. What the point? The result was always the same - to fuck up your mind. What do you want to do? Become someone else? Altered states. Jump around like a monkey. More or less the same as altered suits. More or less.
CHAPTER THREE
“How long have you been here?” I said to Tonya. I’d been there about six months and he’d been there longer than me. It’s funny. It sounded like I was asking about a prison sentence or something.
“Nah, I only came about a month or so before you. Sometimes it feels like forever but it feels like home, you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean. You think you’ll know when enough is enough? When it’s time to stop the madness?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think,” said James, “he means ‘What the fuck are we doing dressed up like this?’”
James had a point. Coming out of your room at The Palace was always a treat. You never quite knew what was going to happen. Tonya and James were sweet lads, an Aussie and a Brit. Both up for it, both nice boys on holiday. But James had a point.
They were trussed up in leather, in I don’t know, the sort of lederhosen you’d get in a sex shop if sex shops sold lederhosen. Maybe a Bavarian sex shop that catered for the S&M crowd. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the only kind of sex shop you got in Bavaria.
Sometimes I didn’t know whether we were on Candid Camera or whether it was for real. Maybe it was one of those Japanese game shows where you had to undergo strange acts of sadism. There was that Clive James used to present called Endurance, I think. I used to write about them, thought they were rubbish, laughing at the funny foreigners. Curiously, I went from writing about them to appearing on one of them once. No, but really.
“Did you order me a coffee?”
Alison. She looked how I felt. Actually if I looked how I felt I’d be happy.
I stopped writing and looked up. Good. She looked how I felt and though I probably also looked how I felt, it made things seem so much better. Loneliness is a terrible thing.
“This bread… it’s something else” I said to her. “It’s your worst white slice nightmare. It looks like a real loaf of bread but there’s nothing there. It’s air and water. Where’s the flour? Where’s the yeast? Where’s the…”
“The soul. Go on, say it. Where’s the soul. Then, when you say that, you can have a bit of a rabbit about how it’s a reflection of Japanese society. Looks good, contains nothing.”
“And bread is the food of life and… “
“Yeah yeah. Bollocks bollocks bollocks. Did you order me a coffee?”
“Of course I ordered you a coffee. You asked me to order coffee, so I ordered coffee.”
“Good. I guess it’s that empty cup there.”
I smiled and she smiled. A familiar scene.
“If I order myself another one then you can have it. We’ll be quits then.”
“OK. So if you do that, I’ll order you another one and you’ll still owe me. You know I like it that way.” We’d talked ourselves into a corner neither of us knew much about and neither of us cared about and there wasn’t anything to do but drink the coffees. Somehow on a day like this, writing gibberish letters to people who’d know nothing of their contents seemed a suitable task.
Our coffees came and the relief that they brought dried up the conversation. Part of the relief. So we drank our coffee and looked at the toast which seemed no more appealing now than it had done when it was first brought over. Big thick lumps of bread. Sometimes the idea of food is better than the food. Maybe one day I’ll find a restaurant where you can order food and you don’t eat it and you don’t pay for it. You could order wild vegetable dishes or exotic and body distressing local specialities without having to endure the eating or the next day grief. A few coffees later and we’d got no further.
So now the rain was coming down. The rain in Tokyo is different to the rain anywhere else. It creates a mirror everywhere. The cars, all clean and shiny reflect against the shop windows which are all clean and bright and they both throw back the reflection of the garish neon which exists in even the sidest of side streets so that everything reflects on everything else and into everything else. Vetrification they call it in the floor cleaning game. You know those floors made of marble slab tiles that are impossibly shiny and sparkly? That’s vetrification. They lay ordinary marble and take the top layer off it with a major wire wool rotating brush so that it all clean. Like a reptile constantly shedding its skin. Like Tokyo.
I’d probably go through the old Apocalypse Now thing if Alison hadn’t beaten me to it.
“Tokyo. Shit” she said.
I was just thinking that. Martin Sheen and helicopter fans. Tokyo. Shit.
“When I was there I couldn’t wait to get out. When I was out, all I could think about was how to get back there,” I said in my best Martin Sheen voice. His own mother wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference if she’d had been sitting in her own bedroom. My mazel, it would probably turn out that she lived somewhere closer than Japan.
“What?”
“Apocal ... nah, doesn’t matter. You just got up?” I said.
“If I’d had got as far down so I needed to get up I wouldn’t have been able to get up at all.”
I only knew what that meant because I felt the same way myself. That old ACE feeling.
“So what’s the story then. Letters day?” she said. “Yeah, it’s important to keep in touch with the old life.”
--------------
One slice, maybe two inches thick and cut into three pieces, like cubes of hot bread or angular doorsteps. I tear into it lethargically - biting is impossible. My mouth is the wrong shape.
Around me in the cafe, people are sitting reading the papers. And the scene is the same as everywhere else in the world. They are turned to the sports pages, checking to see how their boys have done.
Everyone has their tales of glory, their tales of woe. “He’s an ordinary geezer, doesn’t seem to have any grief”. But it’s not true. Everyone has their grief. Well, everyone here does anyway. Everybody everywhere does. Family grief. Parental grief. Boy grief. Girl grief. Body grief. Mind grief. Grief grief.
Another cigarette. Having another cigarette wasn’t so much a decision as a move designed to put off having to make a decision because you know any other decision will probably be wrong and definitely not really worth the effort.
Last night. About last night. There was an acronym - A.C.E. – we used which made us laugh anyway. We’re going to have an ace night. A night out in the company of acid, cocaine and ecstasy. A.C.E. Last night was supposed to be ace. But then every night is supposed to be ace. It got blown out of the water when Mark came in with some smack. That added an ‘H’ - and all we were left with was an ache. But, it’s getting better.
--------------------------------------------
More coffee arrives. People carrying umbrellas walk past. I’m wearing a pink sweatshirt cut off just above the elbow. It is emblazoned with the legend “Chanel - Paris” but no one can see it because it’s inside out. On my legs are a pair of Thai fisherman’s trousers held up by a brown leather belt. My shoes are local specialities called Jika Tabi - black canvas boots which fasten at the back with maybe 15 hook and eye things and which the big toe separated like a foot mitten. They are very comfortable and to your eyes, a little eccentric. The whole ensemble is what you might call ‘witty’. Last night was still here...
..." "Don't let me stop you." So I wrote "... waiting for another coffee" and put my pen down again. You know where you stand with creativity.
------------------
About last night. I remember the way I used to go out. Say, for example, I was supposed to go out at 10. I’d have a bath at 6, a long bath, wash my hair and spend the next two hours poodling around doing my hair and sorting out which clothes to wear. Where were we going? What type of people were going to be there? What impression did I want to create? Did I want a friend for a night? A job? A serious friend? A serious job? I had a suit for each and knew exactly which one would do for each need. The fact that they were all black and baggy and double breasted and made by the same geezer mattered not a jot to anyone but me. I knew and I felt right in each one in a different way. That took me up to about 8ish. Then I’d spend some time on the phone, checking out what the score really was and then I’d spend the next 30 or 40 minutes changing the suit to meet the new requirement. Five minutes before leaving the house, I’d change back to the suit that I always wore. The black baggy one. Dependable and comfortable. Sometimes I’d lay three or four out on my bed, each with a tie and compare and go through different combinations.
Here, things are a bit different. No, maybe that’s misleading. They’re not really different. There isn’t the clothing dilemma, largely because there are no clothes to speak of. How can you deliberate about which suit to wear when you’ve only got one suit? So what do you do? You end up trying to change your inside because you can’t change your outside. Drugs is the new deal. The questions are the old questions. Where were we going? What type of people were going to be there? What impression did I want to create? Did I want a friend for a night, a job, a serious friend? A tab of acid? Maybe a speed cap and half a tab? And a line of coke. A little bit of ketamine. Take half a tab now and half when you get there. And more speed. What the point? The result was always the same - to fuck up your mind. What do you want to do? Become someone else? Altered states. Jump around like a monkey. More or less the same as altered suits. More or less.
CHAPTER THREE
“How long have you been here?” I said to Tonya. I’d been there about six months and he’d been there longer than me. It’s funny. It sounded like I was asking about a prison sentence or something.
“Nah, I only came about a month or so before you. Sometimes it feels like forever but it feels like home, you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean. You think you’ll know when enough is enough? When it’s time to stop the madness?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think,” said James, “he means ‘What the fuck are we doing dressed up like this?’”
James had a point. Coming out of your room at The Palace was always a treat. You never quite knew what was going to happen. Tonya and James were sweet lads, an Aussie and a Brit. Both up for it, both nice boys on holiday. But James had a point.
They were trussed up in leather, in I don’t know, the sort of lederhosen you’d get in a sex shop if sex shops sold lederhosen. Maybe a Bavarian sex shop that catered for the S&M crowd. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the only kind of sex shop you got in Bavaria.
Sometimes I didn’t know whether we were on Candid Camera or whether it was for real. Maybe it was one of those Japanese game shows where you had to undergo strange acts of sadism. There was that Clive James used to present called Endurance, I think. I used to write about them, thought they were rubbish, laughing at the funny foreigners. Curiously, I went from writing about them to appearing on one of them once. No, but really.
A brief interlude
And talking of Bauhaus, any of yous guys heard of The Horrors? They used to be photos waiting to happen, skinny boys who’d once seen a picture of The Cramps and figured (not unreasonably) that that was the way to go. Bryan Gregory. What was that about? And the idea that Mark E Smith and Kid Congo Powers were best mates still makes me smile. Anyway, The Horrors looked like kids let loose in their mum’s dressing up box and made music to suit. Silly music. Music that they thought they should be making. All noise, no soul. Anyway, they disappeared. No one knew, they just did. But they’ve just made a new album and there’s a single free to download and it’s mighty fine. Like they’ve stopped listening to US garage punk and started listening to Neu. A lot of Neu. I used to love Neu. They were part of that Seventies Krautrock thing, but they always seemed to be a really low rent version. None of your Stockhausen influences, none of that let’s all live in a commune and have a spiritual awakening or, at least, some muesli and a shag. No, it was all ‘hit a groove and kick in’. And this Horrors song has clearly borrowed that. There’s the chugga chugga motorik thing going on and it goes on and on and... You know what? Why don’t I just listen to Neu?
Chapter 2
We’re going to Tokyo and we’re going to stay in The Maharajah Palace. You’ve gotta laugh. There’s a kind of inconsistency there that appealed. If I’d have thought of Tokyo and play some sort of word association game, I’d have come up with words like hi-tech, shiny, electronic, space age, digital and maybe electronic again. I’m not sure the words maharajah and palace would have come up in the top 100.
OK. Let’s turn it round the other way. If the words Maharajah Palace don’t make you think of hi-tech, shiny, electronic, space age, digital and maybe electronic again Tokyo, what did they make you think of? Opulence. Grandeur. Exotic baubles, rubies and emeralds and gold, great swathes of elaborately embroidered cloth, shimmering with their gaudiness. Probably not rusty corrugated metal and ramshackle wood. Probably not some pre-fab held up by its own indecision as to which bit should collapse first. If I’d have seen the place – regardless of where it was – I don’t think I’d have been helped. If I’d have seen the place I might have come up with Large Garden Shed. Or Decrepit Old Shack. Or Complete Fucking Dump. Maharajah Palace. It was probably funny once.
The Palace was a zoo. Well, not even a zoo. In a zoo, the animals have some kind of morality. In the Palace… that very concept was kinda dubious.
If you were the romantic type, you might say it was a rogue’s gallery. If you were a realist, you might want to move to somewhere a bit more hi-tech and shiny. Me, I thought it was charming.
It had the air of a hideaway, a place where people were… well, not exactly on the run. That’s a bit too pulp fiction, a bit too romantic, but it was definitely somewhere that felt outside the boundaries, somewhere the normal rules didn’t apply. There were probably other rules that applied.
A few years later, I was hanging out with a Norwegian girl there. I remember talking to her and a bloke called Mark, who the house doctor at the time. Elke was a sweetie, a poppet, but she was very clean living and fresh. It wasn’t so much that she was naïve, it was just that she hadn’t really considered the options before.
“How many people here don’t take drugs?” she said to Mark.
Mark thought a bit. “You must have had something… sometime… haven’t you?”
Like I say, she hadn’t really considered her options. It didn’t take her long to re-adjust, but that’s another story.
----------------------------
It was clear from the off that they knew Graham. Whoever these people were, and there were a lot of people in this place, whoever they were they knew Graham. And they were steering clear.
I could see them looking. I could hear them talking. Some just turned away. Others pretended not to have seen anything. Others were more upfront.
“You’re fuckin’ back, are you? Didn’t think we’d see you again.”
There were a few like that. A couple of faces said “What you got? I’m in Room 24.”
Mostly though, people said stuff like “Hi” or “Good to see you” or “You stayin’ long?” and all the time they all meant “Just leave me alone, please. Just leave me alone.”
I didn’t get it really. OK, he was a bit mad, a loose canon, but people reacted to Graham like he was a paid-up psychopath, a serious bad man. Dunno. He was OK with us. He sorted out a room for me and Ben “Listen, I’ll get you a room, be OK if I just leave my bags there for a bit, yeah?”
“Yeah, OK. Sure.”
Looking back, we were so stupid it was almost funny. We knew he was a drug dealer yet “Sure we’ll look after your bags and if the place gets busted, course we’ll take the rap. No problem. Fancy a tea?” It was like we’d turned from hip, smart, media players into Forrest Gump. Or Chancey Gardener.
I went for a walk. There were two floors. A big kitchen and a lounge area with a few beat up chairs and a telly. The Kirk Douglas film Spartacus was on and maybe there were six people hanging around.
I’d love to say that was the last time I saw Graham. But it wasn’t. He came back a few times – different stories – but it’s all changed. What’s he doing now? No idea. Really, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. Odds on he’s dead now. I heard some story from Pauly about Manilla and you don’t fuck about in Manilla. Still, bless him. He brought me here.
Anyway that was all a long time ago. Now it’s today and today’s a grey miserable day. One of those days when even the rain can’t be bothered…
“Aren’t we supposed to be falling today?”
“Nah, stuff it. I’m going to stay in the cloud today. Watch a bit of telly.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. No one ever thanks us for falling anyway. Fancy a beer?”
OK. Let’s turn it round the other way. If the words Maharajah Palace don’t make you think of hi-tech, shiny, electronic, space age, digital and maybe electronic again Tokyo, what did they make you think of? Opulence. Grandeur. Exotic baubles, rubies and emeralds and gold, great swathes of elaborately embroidered cloth, shimmering with their gaudiness. Probably not rusty corrugated metal and ramshackle wood. Probably not some pre-fab held up by its own indecision as to which bit should collapse first. If I’d have seen the place – regardless of where it was – I don’t think I’d have been helped. If I’d have seen the place I might have come up with Large Garden Shed. Or Decrepit Old Shack. Or Complete Fucking Dump. Maharajah Palace. It was probably funny once.
The Palace was a zoo. Well, not even a zoo. In a zoo, the animals have some kind of morality. In the Palace… that very concept was kinda dubious.
If you were the romantic type, you might say it was a rogue’s gallery. If you were a realist, you might want to move to somewhere a bit more hi-tech and shiny. Me, I thought it was charming.
It had the air of a hideaway, a place where people were… well, not exactly on the run. That’s a bit too pulp fiction, a bit too romantic, but it was definitely somewhere that felt outside the boundaries, somewhere the normal rules didn’t apply. There were probably other rules that applied.
A few years later, I was hanging out with a Norwegian girl there. I remember talking to her and a bloke called Mark, who the house doctor at the time. Elke was a sweetie, a poppet, but she was very clean living and fresh. It wasn’t so much that she was naïve, it was just that she hadn’t really considered the options before.
“How many people here don’t take drugs?” she said to Mark.
Mark thought a bit. “You must have had something… sometime… haven’t you?”
Like I say, she hadn’t really considered her options. It didn’t take her long to re-adjust, but that’s another story.
----------------------------
It was clear from the off that they knew Graham. Whoever these people were, and there were a lot of people in this place, whoever they were they knew Graham. And they were steering clear.
I could see them looking. I could hear them talking. Some just turned away. Others pretended not to have seen anything. Others were more upfront.
“You’re fuckin’ back, are you? Didn’t think we’d see you again.”
There were a few like that. A couple of faces said “What you got? I’m in Room 24.”
Mostly though, people said stuff like “Hi” or “Good to see you” or “You stayin’ long?” and all the time they all meant “Just leave me alone, please. Just leave me alone.”
I didn’t get it really. OK, he was a bit mad, a loose canon, but people reacted to Graham like he was a paid-up psychopath, a serious bad man. Dunno. He was OK with us. He sorted out a room for me and Ben “Listen, I’ll get you a room, be OK if I just leave my bags there for a bit, yeah?”
“Yeah, OK. Sure.”
Looking back, we were so stupid it was almost funny. We knew he was a drug dealer yet “Sure we’ll look after your bags and if the place gets busted, course we’ll take the rap. No problem. Fancy a tea?” It was like we’d turned from hip, smart, media players into Forrest Gump. Or Chancey Gardener.
I went for a walk. There were two floors. A big kitchen and a lounge area with a few beat up chairs and a telly. The Kirk Douglas film Spartacus was on and maybe there were six people hanging around.
I’d love to say that was the last time I saw Graham. But it wasn’t. He came back a few times – different stories – but it’s all changed. What’s he doing now? No idea. Really, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. Odds on he’s dead now. I heard some story from Pauly about Manilla and you don’t fuck about in Manilla. Still, bless him. He brought me here.
Anyway that was all a long time ago. Now it’s today and today’s a grey miserable day. One of those days when even the rain can’t be bothered…
“Aren’t we supposed to be falling today?”
“Nah, stuff it. I’m going to stay in the cloud today. Watch a bit of telly.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. No one ever thanks us for falling anyway. Fancy a beer?”
GAIJIN STRATEGIES - Chapter One
“Fuck it. We’ll go to Yokohama”.
What could we do? We were in Shanghai and had to get out. It was nice enough, fascinating in a cultural exchange kind of way, but I’d exchanged all the culture I wanted to. Time was running out, money was getting tight and we had to get out.
“I thought you said there was a boat going to Hong Kong?” said Ben.
“I thought there was a boat going to Hong Kong”, I said.
“You checked?”
“No, I didn’t check, but I thought there was a boat. I was told there was a boat. What do you want? I was wrong. I thought there was a boat and there isn’t.”
“You thought there was a boat? How did you think there was a boat?”
“Someone told me. They must have cancelled it.”
“According to that bloke in the office there, they cancelled it three years ago.”
“They didn’t cancel it. They just moved it.”
“To Yokohama.”
“Yeah, to Yokohama. It used to go to Hong Kong. Now it goes to Yokohama. That’s where the boat goes now.”
“Oh well. Fuck it. Yokohama.”
“Yeah. Fuck it. Yokohama.”
And that was that. That’s how I ended up in Tokyo. I was going to go to Hong Kong, but the boat changed its mind. One thing I’ve learnt in this game is to keep an open mind. Go with the flow, you know what I mean? When I was younger I used to say that life was like an apple. You’ve got to eat it now. If you keep it, save it, it goes mouldy. And then it’s gone. I said that to someone once. Thought I was being, you know, philosophical. He said “I think life is more like an orange. You've got to peel it before you get to the good bit.” Twat.
------------------
That boat trip was the start of it all. Me and Ben – drifting on the sea heading off to something or other. Me, I’ve gone off travelling because I’m writing a book. Well, starting to write a book. I’ve got a great idea and I just wanted to get away from it all because life was getting too organised and formulaic, but we can get on to all that later.
Anyway, I’ve got an idea for a story. Listen, I thought it was a great idea for a story. Still do. It’s based on a true story, but then again, aren’t they all? It doesn’t matter. It’s a great story. A man, a student, decides to pay his way through college by being a sperm donor. So he gives his sperm and gives his sperm. It’s all good. This bloke – we’ll call him Will – is studying to be a doctor. He’s tall and blond, strong and athletic. The sort of bloke who your mother would want you to marry. This guy offers his sperm and it goes to the top of the sperm charts. He’s the perfect physical speciment.
But he’s got a secret, a secret even he doesn’t know. He (and here we’ve got to work on this a bit) has got a madness, a psychopathic madness – a congenital psychopathic madness.
Anyway, many years – well, maybe 10 years – down the line, Susan is having trouble with her daughter Molly. Molly is very bright, but she’s got an evil streak, a mean side to her that’s a little bit disturbed. And Susan doesn’t know what to do. She can’t ask her partner because she doesn’t have a partner. She never has had. A few lost loves, the usual catalogue of losers and chancers, nearlys and almosts. When Susan was 31, she met the man of her life, the Big Love. But – and we don’t need to go into the detail here – he was a twat, a lying, cheating, no-good dirty low-down hound dog. He wrecked her life and she swore – she absolutely swore – never to fall for a man again. She’d have a baby.
Anyway, back to the main story. Susan tries all sorts of things and, in the end, she goes to a parent-child therapy class because – obviously, she thinks that it’s all her fault. While she’s there, she meets another woman, like her the mother of a 10 year old girl. They start talking.
Can you guess where this one’s going? OK, let’s spell it out a bit more.
This other woman, her story is remarkably similar to Susan. She’s a lesbian but, that apart, it’s the same. Lost love, disappointment, betrayal. Refuge sought in a baby. Her baby is basically a good kid, but has got the same evil streak as Molly.
Now you know what’s going to happen. They start talking, they realise they both got pregnant after going to sperm donor centre in Eastbourne. Now then – this is the next question: how many other babies were born between 1980 and 1985?
So OK. That’s the pitch. It’s like a cross between The Boys From Brazil and maybe The Midwitch Cuckoos.
How many are there? Does something happen to them to ‘kick-start’ the inner madness that propels them? Shall we turn them into an army?
So anyway, I was sitting on the deck of this boat, it’s the middle of the night, dark and empty, just me and the night and the sea, and I’m thinking about the story – when the calm is disturbed by this couple. A big English bloke and his Israeli girlfriend. They were going at it big time, tearing into each other.
But then they saw us and found what they were looking for: an audience. We started talking, just passing the time. When I say, we started talking what I mean is he started talking. I started listening. Most of the time I didn’t know whether to interrupt or applaud, like I was at a show or something.
Always, there are two ways of looking at things. I could say that we met this bloke from south London on the boat who was off his tits and he read us this poem he’d written as a response to Paradise Lost. I can’t remember exactly now. He was the Devil or he was Milton and… Or I can tell you the more interesting version.
I didn’t know it at the time, but he was The One. I only met him for a brief time and I doubt that he even knew my name, but Graham was that person, and who changed my life. Graham Gaskin – and you can look his name up because this is all true – was there just at the right time and the right place to completely throw my life off course.
We’ve all got one, the person who changes everything. I’m writing this book about all that at the moment called The Nazi & The Jew about a young middle class Jewish man who, through a series of strange, some might say unfortunate, circumstances, finds himself in jail. At first he’s told that it’s all going to be OK, that it’s a single cell and he’ll be out soon enough. He’s scared by at least he’s by himself and then…. Late at night the door opens and in walks in a prisoner officer. The screw explains that the prison’s over-crowded and that Aaron, the Jewish bloke, is going to have to share. In walks in Razor, all shaved head and tattoos, a Nazi who’s one of the top figures in Combat 18, the psycho military wing of the British fascists, gangland figure and general Nazi nutter and Aaron’s worst nightmare. The cell door bangs shut and there they are, alone together.
What happens to them, how they get on, that’s the story. It’s part Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, part humanist tale, but – like I say – it’s about that person that changes your life.
Anyway, we’re standing on the deck of this boat going to Yokohama and it’s the middle of the night. A beautiful night. And there’s this bloke giving us this rant about Milton and Paradise Lost. He could have been 25 or 35. Big build, longish hair, nondescript clothes. Jeans, t-shirt, that kind of thing. He was good-looking, but rough. Like he’d been away too long. And God knows where he’d been away to. I’d gone away looking for something different and this, this was something different.
“Tokyo, huh. Fuckin place Tokyo. A zoo. Full of hooligans and fuckin Japs. You got a story going on there or what?”
Meeting this bloke, I was part thrilled, part terrified. Part of me was thinking “How cool. I go away, looking for an adventure and in the first half hour I meet my very own Dean Moriarty, some wild spirited free thing with energy to burn and a soul on fire”. The other part of me – the middle class, middle aged bloke who drives a Volvo and knows his National Insurance number off by heart – is frankly terrified and wants this bloody idiot to just go away. He was at best boorish and at worst dangerous. No, he was definitely dangerous.
“No, no story. No story and no idea” I said. And explained. “I was supposed to be going to Hong Kong. I had a job on a newspaper there, the South Morning Post, I think it’s called, but then the boat to Hong Kong stopped two years ago and the only boat now went to Yokohama and…” Even as I said it, it sounded rubbish. God knows what it sounded like to him, but it was the story.
“And you?” said Graham to Ben.
“And me” said Ben. “I’m just along for the ride.” You don’t trust this, do you, I thought to myself. Probably not a bad judgement.
“Sounds to me” said Graham “you’re gonna some dosh. Tokyo’s no place to be skint”. Then came the good bit.
“You wanna make a bit of cash? Easy money.”
Me, I was already suspicious. Ben was more interested. “Go on” he said.
Graham smiled at Ronit and then at us. He made a big dramatic looking around gesture – like he needed to. It was the middle of the night and we were on the deck of a boat. It wasn’t Piccadilly Circus.
He opened his bag and pulled out a pair of shoes which were about three sizes too big – and smiled. The significance was lost on me. I just thought it was odd.
“You’re a shoe salesman?”
“Something like that” said Graham and reached down into his bag again. After doing the dramatic looking around bit again – there’s nothing like milking the moment and Graham, a performer at heart, knew how to do that – he produced an inner sole which was about an inch thick and covered in thick cling film. Me and Ben might have been at the start of the story and about as worldly as a new born seal cub, but I knew what Graham was holding. Dope. Compressed dope. Moroccan.
He put the inner sole inside the shoe. “All you’ve got to do is walk. You ain’t got a problem walking, have you?”
No one said anything. I didn’t say anything. Ben didn’t say anything. The Israeli girl – Ronit – she didn’t say anything either.
“Look” said Graham, “I wouldn’t ask, but I’ve got three shoes and” – and he pointed down at his feet – “only two feet”.
No one said anything.
“I mean I’ve got three fucking soles. I can put two in my shoes, but I need someone else to go through with the other one. Just wear the shoes, walk through and I’ll give you a grand. Easy. Listen” he looked directly at me. “It’ll sort you out on Tokyo, get you started. Otherwise you’re gonna be in right shit, believe me”.
I remember looking at Graham and seeing all these Japanese war films in my head, sadistic guards beating people up – “Ve hav vays of making you tok!” OK, that’s a German war film, but you know what I mean. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Melly Chlistmas Mr Rawrence.
He’s going to walk through customs at Yokohama with these clowns shoes that are way too big and sell this lot in Tokyo. A lunatic.
I declined. Polite, of course, but firm. “Sorry, mate. I just haven’t got the nerve for that sort of thing”. Ben was tempted, I could see Ben was tempted. I could see all sorts of things. Like… Ben fancied Ronit and was showing off and I was thinking that on the list of bad ideas, flirting with Graham’s woman was off the scale.
Ben declined. Thank fuck for that.
“Look. OK, you ain’t done anything like this before but it’s OK. The Japs don’t do anything. All you’ve gotta be is polite and smile, that’s all. It’s what they do and it’s what they want us to do. You can call them anything, do anything but as long as you’re polite, it’s OK. You’ve got to remember, they think we’re some kind of dirty sub species anyway. They don’t expect anything proper.”
Nothing.
“Nah, no sweat” said Graham, maybe a bit too readily. “I’ll sort it”.
I didn’t think any more of it at the time, though later on someone – Brad the Canadian, I think – told me that Graham’s usual trick was to hide the dope in some poor unsuspecting bastard’s back pack, let them take it through customs – and then steal the bag from them on the other side when they’d got through. Didn’t do anything like that with us. Don’t know why. Maybe he liked us. God knows.
We sat up the rest of the night, the four of us, smoking a bit while Graham told us stories about how he’d paid for the trip by blackmailing an MP he’d had a fling with. “I’m gonna write it all down and make it into a TV film. Those bastards won’t forget about me”. All I remember thinking was “Why are you telling us this?” Whatever. Back then I was so naïve about this lark I’d have believed anything. The last thing I suspected was that it was all true – but sometimes the last place you suspect is the first place you should look.
Customs was a joy. Graham insisted on walking through with us, talking to us and laughing all the way. The Japanese were pretty much like he said – they looked at us like we were slightly dirty, like we they just hoped we’d got away. But they humoured us and let us in. Curiously, it was kinda how I felt about Graham.
We got through. I was terrified. He didn’t seem to give a toss. But we got through. Looking back, I don’t know why I was terrified – that business of dropping the dope in someone else’s backpack hadn’t occurred to me at all – that kind of thinking was completely off my radar. Maybe it was some kinda instinct thing. We got through.
Tokyo. We were in Tokyo. I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting that was. Tokyo. That was amazing. A month ago I was in London and now I was in Tokyo. Well, I was on a train going to Tokyo. Just me. And Ben. And Graham. And Ronit.
It was a strange journey, didn’t take long and to be honest I can’t remember much about it. I remember Graham rolling one his trouser legs up and revealing an inner sole gaffer taped to his leg. I remember that. I also remember him asking us where we were going to stay.
“I dunno” said Ben. “Some hotel in town. We’ll ask around, maybe tourist info or something, and find something for a few days and…”
“Like fuck you will. You’re coming with us. You ever heard of the Palace?”
“The palace?”
“The Maharajah Palace. That’s where we’re going.”
What could we do? We were in Shanghai and had to get out. It was nice enough, fascinating in a cultural exchange kind of way, but I’d exchanged all the culture I wanted to. Time was running out, money was getting tight and we had to get out.
“I thought you said there was a boat going to Hong Kong?” said Ben.
“I thought there was a boat going to Hong Kong”, I said.
“You checked?”
“No, I didn’t check, but I thought there was a boat. I was told there was a boat. What do you want? I was wrong. I thought there was a boat and there isn’t.”
“You thought there was a boat? How did you think there was a boat?”
“Someone told me. They must have cancelled it.”
“According to that bloke in the office there, they cancelled it three years ago.”
“They didn’t cancel it. They just moved it.”
“To Yokohama.”
“Yeah, to Yokohama. It used to go to Hong Kong. Now it goes to Yokohama. That’s where the boat goes now.”
“Oh well. Fuck it. Yokohama.”
“Yeah. Fuck it. Yokohama.”
And that was that. That’s how I ended up in Tokyo. I was going to go to Hong Kong, but the boat changed its mind. One thing I’ve learnt in this game is to keep an open mind. Go with the flow, you know what I mean? When I was younger I used to say that life was like an apple. You’ve got to eat it now. If you keep it, save it, it goes mouldy. And then it’s gone. I said that to someone once. Thought I was being, you know, philosophical. He said “I think life is more like an orange. You've got to peel it before you get to the good bit.” Twat.
------------------
That boat trip was the start of it all. Me and Ben – drifting on the sea heading off to something or other. Me, I’ve gone off travelling because I’m writing a book. Well, starting to write a book. I’ve got a great idea and I just wanted to get away from it all because life was getting too organised and formulaic, but we can get on to all that later.
Anyway, I’ve got an idea for a story. Listen, I thought it was a great idea for a story. Still do. It’s based on a true story, but then again, aren’t they all? It doesn’t matter. It’s a great story. A man, a student, decides to pay his way through college by being a sperm donor. So he gives his sperm and gives his sperm. It’s all good. This bloke – we’ll call him Will – is studying to be a doctor. He’s tall and blond, strong and athletic. The sort of bloke who your mother would want you to marry. This guy offers his sperm and it goes to the top of the sperm charts. He’s the perfect physical speciment.
But he’s got a secret, a secret even he doesn’t know. He (and here we’ve got to work on this a bit) has got a madness, a psychopathic madness – a congenital psychopathic madness.
Anyway, many years – well, maybe 10 years – down the line, Susan is having trouble with her daughter Molly. Molly is very bright, but she’s got an evil streak, a mean side to her that’s a little bit disturbed. And Susan doesn’t know what to do. She can’t ask her partner because she doesn’t have a partner. She never has had. A few lost loves, the usual catalogue of losers and chancers, nearlys and almosts. When Susan was 31, she met the man of her life, the Big Love. But – and we don’t need to go into the detail here – he was a twat, a lying, cheating, no-good dirty low-down hound dog. He wrecked her life and she swore – she absolutely swore – never to fall for a man again. She’d have a baby.
Anyway, back to the main story. Susan tries all sorts of things and, in the end, she goes to a parent-child therapy class because – obviously, she thinks that it’s all her fault. While she’s there, she meets another woman, like her the mother of a 10 year old girl. They start talking.
Can you guess where this one’s going? OK, let’s spell it out a bit more.
This other woman, her story is remarkably similar to Susan. She’s a lesbian but, that apart, it’s the same. Lost love, disappointment, betrayal. Refuge sought in a baby. Her baby is basically a good kid, but has got the same evil streak as Molly.
Now you know what’s going to happen. They start talking, they realise they both got pregnant after going to sperm donor centre in Eastbourne. Now then – this is the next question: how many other babies were born between 1980 and 1985?
So OK. That’s the pitch. It’s like a cross between The Boys From Brazil and maybe The Midwitch Cuckoos.
How many are there? Does something happen to them to ‘kick-start’ the inner madness that propels them? Shall we turn them into an army?
So anyway, I was sitting on the deck of this boat, it’s the middle of the night, dark and empty, just me and the night and the sea, and I’m thinking about the story – when the calm is disturbed by this couple. A big English bloke and his Israeli girlfriend. They were going at it big time, tearing into each other.
But then they saw us and found what they were looking for: an audience. We started talking, just passing the time. When I say, we started talking what I mean is he started talking. I started listening. Most of the time I didn’t know whether to interrupt or applaud, like I was at a show or something.
Always, there are two ways of looking at things. I could say that we met this bloke from south London on the boat who was off his tits and he read us this poem he’d written as a response to Paradise Lost. I can’t remember exactly now. He was the Devil or he was Milton and… Or I can tell you the more interesting version.
I didn’t know it at the time, but he was The One. I only met him for a brief time and I doubt that he even knew my name, but Graham was that person, and who changed my life. Graham Gaskin – and you can look his name up because this is all true – was there just at the right time and the right place to completely throw my life off course.
We’ve all got one, the person who changes everything. I’m writing this book about all that at the moment called The Nazi & The Jew about a young middle class Jewish man who, through a series of strange, some might say unfortunate, circumstances, finds himself in jail. At first he’s told that it’s all going to be OK, that it’s a single cell and he’ll be out soon enough. He’s scared by at least he’s by himself and then…. Late at night the door opens and in walks in a prisoner officer. The screw explains that the prison’s over-crowded and that Aaron, the Jewish bloke, is going to have to share. In walks in Razor, all shaved head and tattoos, a Nazi who’s one of the top figures in Combat 18, the psycho military wing of the British fascists, gangland figure and general Nazi nutter and Aaron’s worst nightmare. The cell door bangs shut and there they are, alone together.
What happens to them, how they get on, that’s the story. It’s part Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, part humanist tale, but – like I say – it’s about that person that changes your life.
Anyway, we’re standing on the deck of this boat going to Yokohama and it’s the middle of the night. A beautiful night. And there’s this bloke giving us this rant about Milton and Paradise Lost. He could have been 25 or 35. Big build, longish hair, nondescript clothes. Jeans, t-shirt, that kind of thing. He was good-looking, but rough. Like he’d been away too long. And God knows where he’d been away to. I’d gone away looking for something different and this, this was something different.
“Tokyo, huh. Fuckin place Tokyo. A zoo. Full of hooligans and fuckin Japs. You got a story going on there or what?”
Meeting this bloke, I was part thrilled, part terrified. Part of me was thinking “How cool. I go away, looking for an adventure and in the first half hour I meet my very own Dean Moriarty, some wild spirited free thing with energy to burn and a soul on fire”. The other part of me – the middle class, middle aged bloke who drives a Volvo and knows his National Insurance number off by heart – is frankly terrified and wants this bloody idiot to just go away. He was at best boorish and at worst dangerous. No, he was definitely dangerous.
“No, no story. No story and no idea” I said. And explained. “I was supposed to be going to Hong Kong. I had a job on a newspaper there, the South Morning Post, I think it’s called, but then the boat to Hong Kong stopped two years ago and the only boat now went to Yokohama and…” Even as I said it, it sounded rubbish. God knows what it sounded like to him, but it was the story.
“And you?” said Graham to Ben.
“And me” said Ben. “I’m just along for the ride.” You don’t trust this, do you, I thought to myself. Probably not a bad judgement.
“Sounds to me” said Graham “you’re gonna some dosh. Tokyo’s no place to be skint”. Then came the good bit.
“You wanna make a bit of cash? Easy money.”
Me, I was already suspicious. Ben was more interested. “Go on” he said.
Graham smiled at Ronit and then at us. He made a big dramatic looking around gesture – like he needed to. It was the middle of the night and we were on the deck of a boat. It wasn’t Piccadilly Circus.
He opened his bag and pulled out a pair of shoes which were about three sizes too big – and smiled. The significance was lost on me. I just thought it was odd.
“You’re a shoe salesman?”
“Something like that” said Graham and reached down into his bag again. After doing the dramatic looking around bit again – there’s nothing like milking the moment and Graham, a performer at heart, knew how to do that – he produced an inner sole which was about an inch thick and covered in thick cling film. Me and Ben might have been at the start of the story and about as worldly as a new born seal cub, but I knew what Graham was holding. Dope. Compressed dope. Moroccan.
He put the inner sole inside the shoe. “All you’ve got to do is walk. You ain’t got a problem walking, have you?”
No one said anything. I didn’t say anything. Ben didn’t say anything. The Israeli girl – Ronit – she didn’t say anything either.
“Look” said Graham, “I wouldn’t ask, but I’ve got three shoes and” – and he pointed down at his feet – “only two feet”.
No one said anything.
“I mean I’ve got three fucking soles. I can put two in my shoes, but I need someone else to go through with the other one. Just wear the shoes, walk through and I’ll give you a grand. Easy. Listen” he looked directly at me. “It’ll sort you out on Tokyo, get you started. Otherwise you’re gonna be in right shit, believe me”.
I remember looking at Graham and seeing all these Japanese war films in my head, sadistic guards beating people up – “Ve hav vays of making you tok!” OK, that’s a German war film, but you know what I mean. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Melly Chlistmas Mr Rawrence.
He’s going to walk through customs at Yokohama with these clowns shoes that are way too big and sell this lot in Tokyo. A lunatic.
I declined. Polite, of course, but firm. “Sorry, mate. I just haven’t got the nerve for that sort of thing”. Ben was tempted, I could see Ben was tempted. I could see all sorts of things. Like… Ben fancied Ronit and was showing off and I was thinking that on the list of bad ideas, flirting with Graham’s woman was off the scale.
Ben declined. Thank fuck for that.
“Look. OK, you ain’t done anything like this before but it’s OK. The Japs don’t do anything. All you’ve gotta be is polite and smile, that’s all. It’s what they do and it’s what they want us to do. You can call them anything, do anything but as long as you’re polite, it’s OK. You’ve got to remember, they think we’re some kind of dirty sub species anyway. They don’t expect anything proper.”
Nothing.
“Nah, no sweat” said Graham, maybe a bit too readily. “I’ll sort it”.
I didn’t think any more of it at the time, though later on someone – Brad the Canadian, I think – told me that Graham’s usual trick was to hide the dope in some poor unsuspecting bastard’s back pack, let them take it through customs – and then steal the bag from them on the other side when they’d got through. Didn’t do anything like that with us. Don’t know why. Maybe he liked us. God knows.
We sat up the rest of the night, the four of us, smoking a bit while Graham told us stories about how he’d paid for the trip by blackmailing an MP he’d had a fling with. “I’m gonna write it all down and make it into a TV film. Those bastards won’t forget about me”. All I remember thinking was “Why are you telling us this?” Whatever. Back then I was so naïve about this lark I’d have believed anything. The last thing I suspected was that it was all true – but sometimes the last place you suspect is the first place you should look.
Customs was a joy. Graham insisted on walking through with us, talking to us and laughing all the way. The Japanese were pretty much like he said – they looked at us like we were slightly dirty, like we they just hoped we’d got away. But they humoured us and let us in. Curiously, it was kinda how I felt about Graham.
We got through. I was terrified. He didn’t seem to give a toss. But we got through. Looking back, I don’t know why I was terrified – that business of dropping the dope in someone else’s backpack hadn’t occurred to me at all – that kind of thinking was completely off my radar. Maybe it was some kinda instinct thing. We got through.
Tokyo. We were in Tokyo. I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting that was. Tokyo. That was amazing. A month ago I was in London and now I was in Tokyo. Well, I was on a train going to Tokyo. Just me. And Ben. And Graham. And Ronit.
It was a strange journey, didn’t take long and to be honest I can’t remember much about it. I remember Graham rolling one his trouser legs up and revealing an inner sole gaffer taped to his leg. I remember that. I also remember him asking us where we were going to stay.
“I dunno” said Ben. “Some hotel in town. We’ll ask around, maybe tourist info or something, and find something for a few days and…”
“Like fuck you will. You’re coming with us. You ever heard of the Palace?”
“The palace?”
“The Maharajah Palace. That’s where we’re going.”
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
The First Law Of Averages
CHAPTER ONE
So... This morning I got up – it’s traditional – went to the park to take Maxwell Wolf out for a walk. Another beautiful day in paradise. What to do? My brain’s a turmoil. I’ve finished the decking so that’s that. I’ve finished the garden lighting so that’s that too. I’ve tidied up and taken all the rubbish to the dump. Done. Re-turfed the lawn. Done. Built a rockery. Done. Solved the problem of where to store the bikes. Done. (Large hooks drilled reasonably high into the wall – off the ground, protected from the weather). I’ve done more to the garden, played with more power tools than any middle-aged, middle-class Jewish father of two has any right to do. But now? What to do? (I’ve just heard that Barclays bank is cutting 800 jobs. Another potential avenue of pleasure slams in my face).
I wandered around, making lists in my head (1: Phone the mortgage advisor, 2: Go through the mail, 3: Check out the pond, 4: Phone up the accountant, 5: Press ‘Send/Receive’ on my e-mail - harder to do than you might think. It’s become an increasing confrontational action. There’s either rubbish virus crap “Here’s that document you requested” type stuff has replaced all the “Enlarge your penis/consolidate your debts” stuff or things from either of the two round robin group lists I’m on. Take all that away and it’s down to the odd mail from Gill Wife and she’s downstairs and only writes cos she can’t be bothered to shout. Hardly the stuff this super-highway technology was built for. Kinda like in the old days when the squliions spent on the space programme was justified by the fact that without it we wouldn’t have had the non-stick pan.
So anyway. I was thinking. (Yeah, I know. It was a Christmas present last year. What can you do?) The older we get, the smaller our worlds get. Is it true? I don’t know. I think so. OK. Not 'Is it true?' but more 'It's true for me'. The rare luxury of going to the cinema on my own, a treat that was a staple of my youth but one of those things (like... just about every other selfish pleasure) that had to move out to accommodate life. You'd have thought The Lord would have foreseen such things and made our lives bigger as we went on. You know, you start off with 24 hours for yourself, but then you're expected to take on board a wife, kids, a job, the dogs, the cats, the kids' friends, a mortgage, the garden, a new kitchen, knocking out the back wall and sorting out a conservatory, the "what are we going to do about the school?" question - The Baggage - in that same 24 hours. And it's worse, because when you were younger you had more energy (or at least more drugs that gave you more energy) so your youthful 24 hours lasted longer than your grown up 24 hours. Who would it hurt if we were given, say, an additional three hours a day with each extra child? OK, there’d be a bit of re-structuring to do, but I’d be a fantastic parent, do all sorts of things with the kids. I’d go to that evening life drawing class in Bond Street. I would be that person. I wonder if Brighton Progressive Synagogue's got a Suggestion Box? Maybe one day I'll find out. If I ever go there. If I ever get the time.
I bought myself a bass guitar. It’ll be an interesting experiment to see how much dust can build up on an inanimate object if it’s never moved.
That was a week ago. A week ago and a different lifetime. A week ago I decided to stop all that. I decided to get a life. I got my bicycle down (from the large hooks drilled reasonably high into the wall. Come on, keep up) and after dousing it in extra virgin olive oil – Jane Wife caught me in mid-douse and… what can I tell you? She’s a very understanding woman – I signed up.
On Monday I do T’ai Chi at Planet Janet. On Tuesday I do a creative writing workshop at Evolution. On Wednesday I go to a life drawing class in Bond Street. On Thursday I do my Landmark session in London. On Friday I go to yoga at Jo’s.
I’m getting my body into shape, I’m sorting out my creativity, and I get to doing something I’ve never done before while looking at naked women. No, no. It’s OK. Thanks to my Landmark I can say things like that with integrity and authenticity. My chakras are balanced. I can feel it. Talk about inside smile. I’m so happy, so calm, so… so full of centred creativity I’ve barely got time to swallow the St John’s Wort.
Maxwell Wolf has gone round the family taking odds on how long I’ll stick with each one.
“Hmm, Pilates?” he said with that ‘I found out where you hide the pig’s ears’ smile.
“Ashtanga yoga?”
This is Maxwell my faithful puppy, my support structure, Maxwell Wolf who I rescued from the gutter of life when he still had some discarded Christmas paper stuck to him.
So then this happened. I got an e-mail from an agent. Now I’ve had e-mails from agents before but they’ve all been “House prices in Kemp Town are going up…” which is nice but unless they’re going down everywhere else, what difference? Anyway, this was different. This was from a literary agent. I’ll say that again. Literary agent. Sounds good, no?
Really. It’s a long story but this agent – this literary agent - asked to see some words...
“Have you got any fiction?” he said. “I’m looking for new writers”.
“Course” I said, but really it was like Alex Ferguson asking me if I’ve ever played up front cos Rooney’s injured. “Course”. Fiction? Fiction’s my middle name.
So today I’ve been sitting here trying to make sense of piles of notes, all called things like “Chapter One”.
Yesterday I took Maxwell to the vet to have his anal glands done. That’ll teach him.
So... This morning I got up – it’s traditional – went to the park to take Maxwell Wolf out for a walk. Another beautiful day in paradise. What to do? My brain’s a turmoil. I’ve finished the decking so that’s that. I’ve finished the garden lighting so that’s that too. I’ve tidied up and taken all the rubbish to the dump. Done. Re-turfed the lawn. Done. Built a rockery. Done. Solved the problem of where to store the bikes. Done. (Large hooks drilled reasonably high into the wall – off the ground, protected from the weather). I’ve done more to the garden, played with more power tools than any middle-aged, middle-class Jewish father of two has any right to do. But now? What to do? (I’ve just heard that Barclays bank is cutting 800 jobs. Another potential avenue of pleasure slams in my face).
I wandered around, making lists in my head (1: Phone the mortgage advisor, 2: Go through the mail, 3: Check out the pond, 4: Phone up the accountant, 5: Press ‘Send/Receive’ on my e-mail - harder to do than you might think. It’s become an increasing confrontational action. There’s either rubbish virus crap “Here’s that document you requested” type stuff has replaced all the “Enlarge your penis/consolidate your debts” stuff or things from either of the two round robin group lists I’m on. Take all that away and it’s down to the odd mail from Gill Wife and she’s downstairs and only writes cos she can’t be bothered to shout. Hardly the stuff this super-highway technology was built for. Kinda like in the old days when the squliions spent on the space programme was justified by the fact that without it we wouldn’t have had the non-stick pan.
So anyway. I was thinking. (Yeah, I know. It was a Christmas present last year. What can you do?) The older we get, the smaller our worlds get. Is it true? I don’t know. I think so. OK. Not 'Is it true?' but more 'It's true for me'. The rare luxury of going to the cinema on my own, a treat that was a staple of my youth but one of those things (like... just about every other selfish pleasure) that had to move out to accommodate life. You'd have thought The Lord would have foreseen such things and made our lives bigger as we went on. You know, you start off with 24 hours for yourself, but then you're expected to take on board a wife, kids, a job, the dogs, the cats, the kids' friends, a mortgage, the garden, a new kitchen, knocking out the back wall and sorting out a conservatory, the "what are we going to do about the school?" question - The Baggage - in that same 24 hours. And it's worse, because when you were younger you had more energy (or at least more drugs that gave you more energy) so your youthful 24 hours lasted longer than your grown up 24 hours. Who would it hurt if we were given, say, an additional three hours a day with each extra child? OK, there’d be a bit of re-structuring to do, but I’d be a fantastic parent, do all sorts of things with the kids. I’d go to that evening life drawing class in Bond Street. I would be that person. I wonder if Brighton Progressive Synagogue's got a Suggestion Box? Maybe one day I'll find out. If I ever go there. If I ever get the time.
I bought myself a bass guitar. It’ll be an interesting experiment to see how much dust can build up on an inanimate object if it’s never moved.
That was a week ago. A week ago and a different lifetime. A week ago I decided to stop all that. I decided to get a life. I got my bicycle down (from the large hooks drilled reasonably high into the wall. Come on, keep up) and after dousing it in extra virgin olive oil – Jane Wife caught me in mid-douse and… what can I tell you? She’s a very understanding woman – I signed up.
On Monday I do T’ai Chi at Planet Janet. On Tuesday I do a creative writing workshop at Evolution. On Wednesday I go to a life drawing class in Bond Street. On Thursday I do my Landmark session in London. On Friday I go to yoga at Jo’s.
I’m getting my body into shape, I’m sorting out my creativity, and I get to doing something I’ve never done before while looking at naked women. No, no. It’s OK. Thanks to my Landmark I can say things like that with integrity and authenticity. My chakras are balanced. I can feel it. Talk about inside smile. I’m so happy, so calm, so… so full of centred creativity I’ve barely got time to swallow the St John’s Wort.
Maxwell Wolf has gone round the family taking odds on how long I’ll stick with each one.
“Hmm, Pilates?” he said with that ‘I found out where you hide the pig’s ears’ smile.
“Ashtanga yoga?”
This is Maxwell my faithful puppy, my support structure, Maxwell Wolf who I rescued from the gutter of life when he still had some discarded Christmas paper stuck to him.
So then this happened. I got an e-mail from an agent. Now I’ve had e-mails from agents before but they’ve all been “House prices in Kemp Town are going up…” which is nice but unless they’re going down everywhere else, what difference? Anyway, this was different. This was from a literary agent. I’ll say that again. Literary agent. Sounds good, no?
Really. It’s a long story but this agent – this literary agent - asked to see some words...
“Have you got any fiction?” he said. “I’m looking for new writers”.
“Course” I said, but really it was like Alex Ferguson asking me if I’ve ever played up front cos Rooney’s injured. “Course”. Fiction? Fiction’s my middle name.
So today I’ve been sitting here trying to make sense of piles of notes, all called things like “Chapter One”.
Yesterday I took Maxwell to the vet to have his anal glands done. That’ll teach him.
Sunday, 26 October 2008
Jewgolos
So anyway. I was talking to Jane the other day and she came up with this idea. (I’d love to take credit for this cos it’s genius, but not even I’d do that. And besides, she might read this nonsense). She said “John, what are you doing with this banging your head against a wall? Why not do something you’re good at?” Well, to cut a long story short she came up with this new concept: Jewgolos. A Jewgolo is a bit like a gigolo, but essentially Jewish in nature. Listen.
Basically, where your regular gigolo maybe takes you for a drink and then upstairs for the jiggy stuff, your Jewgolo will take you out to eat and moan. Like I say, it’s genius. Everyone thinks they like the jiggy thing but you do it once, it’s enough. What people really like doing is eating and moaning. You never get bored with that.
This is the thing. The older you get, your ideas change. When you’re younger and your head’s full of unrealistic ideas you think the moaning that comes when you’re doing all that jiggy stuff is the good moaning. OK if you’re 18 or something but be honest. If you’re a grown-up by the time you get into bed all you want to do is have a sleep. “You carry on with all that. No, no, it’s fine. I’m just going to close my eyes.” No. The good moaning is actually just moaning. Sitting down, having something to eat and moaning.
Once you start eating and moaning you can keep going for hours. You can eat as much as you want and you don’t feel bad about yourself because your body’s started migrating. And you can get home in time for EastEnders on BBC3. You know I’m right. Trust me. Jewgolos.
I’d been thinking about doing something new anyway. Things haven’t been… I don’t know. I won’t bore you with it– you don’t want to know – but I’d erased everything on my computer and life was, as my Landmark chums might say, full of possibilities. E-mails, address book, files… gone. My calendar had been wiped which meant that now I had a load of spare time, but it’s a question of perspective. Jane said that at my age I can do with all the spare time I can get. That’s the sort of thinking that made me want to marry her. The literary agent, the one who was going to whisk me off into a bright new future, hasn’t replied to any of my e-mails and now I’ve lost his address anyway. His loss. What’s an agent anyway? Write your own book if you’re so clever.
A new career. It’s easy. I’ll put up ads in all the usual places – Evolution, Janet, the back pages of this mag. I’ll tell them it’s an ancient Native American tradition, that always works. The alfalfa sprouts believe anything if you say it’s Native American.
“You’ve got a back ache? OK. I’ll put a candle in your ear and then set light to it”.
“What?”
“No, no. It’s an ancient Native American tradition.”
“Oh, OK then”.
Maybe we could maybe do a deluxe service where we complain about the size of the portions.
Basically, where your regular gigolo maybe takes you for a drink and then upstairs for the jiggy stuff, your Jewgolo will take you out to eat and moan. Like I say, it’s genius. Everyone thinks they like the jiggy thing but you do it once, it’s enough. What people really like doing is eating and moaning. You never get bored with that.
This is the thing. The older you get, your ideas change. When you’re younger and your head’s full of unrealistic ideas you think the moaning that comes when you’re doing all that jiggy stuff is the good moaning. OK if you’re 18 or something but be honest. If you’re a grown-up by the time you get into bed all you want to do is have a sleep. “You carry on with all that. No, no, it’s fine. I’m just going to close my eyes.” No. The good moaning is actually just moaning. Sitting down, having something to eat and moaning.
Once you start eating and moaning you can keep going for hours. You can eat as much as you want and you don’t feel bad about yourself because your body’s started migrating. And you can get home in time for EastEnders on BBC3. You know I’m right. Trust me. Jewgolos.
I’d been thinking about doing something new anyway. Things haven’t been… I don’t know. I won’t bore you with it– you don’t want to know – but I’d erased everything on my computer and life was, as my Landmark chums might say, full of possibilities. E-mails, address book, files… gone. My calendar had been wiped which meant that now I had a load of spare time, but it’s a question of perspective. Jane said that at my age I can do with all the spare time I can get. That’s the sort of thinking that made me want to marry her. The literary agent, the one who was going to whisk me off into a bright new future, hasn’t replied to any of my e-mails and now I’ve lost his address anyway. His loss. What’s an agent anyway? Write your own book if you’re so clever.
A new career. It’s easy. I’ll put up ads in all the usual places – Evolution, Janet, the back pages of this mag. I’ll tell them it’s an ancient Native American tradition, that always works. The alfalfa sprouts believe anything if you say it’s Native American.
“You’ve got a back ache? OK. I’ll put a candle in your ear and then set light to it”.
“What?”
“No, no. It’s an ancient Native American tradition.”
“Oh, OK then”.
Maybe we could maybe do a deluxe service where we complain about the size of the portions.
CHAPTER 9 - Charity Begins At Home
CHAPTER 9 - Charity Begins At Home
9.30 and I’m upstairs, in the attic. Feeling sweaty, but smug and self-righteous. I’ve done 50 sit ups on one of those “abs buster” machines, I’ve lifted up those weights I bought in 1987 and I’ve had a wheat-free breakfast and a tablespoon of psyillican husks. I must be at least half a stone lighter already. Minimum.
You know what it’s like. It’s the summer. You get out your favourite summer suit, put it on and… So you say to yourself “I’m going to get fit. I’m going to take this in hand and do something about it.” Then you go to a lovely, shiny health club, hand over roughly the same amount of money that would otherwise buy you a small chateau and make the small but familiar joke: “Hah. I’ve only just joined and I’ve already lost a hundred pounds”. As gags, it’s up there with the vasectomy nurse who told me “You’ll just feel a small prick”, but hey.
Anyway. So I’m in the squash league. I used to play squash but that was back in the days when racquets were made of wood, not the titanium or schmitanium or whatever it is these things are made of now. Missed out graphite entirely. Now these things are so powerful they’ve had to introduce a new ball, also made of schmitanium to withstand the battering.
My first game, I bounded on to the court, head to toe in my virgin kit, which comes courtesy of my favourite designer, Primark. Total cost: £3.50.
The bloke I was playing looked OK. My kind of age, my kind of follicle count. We started hitting.
“I haven’t played for ages,” I said to him.
“Neither have I,” he said. “I haven’t stepped on this court since I broke my leg”.
“Blimey. Was that long ago? Are you OK?”
“Fine now. Amazing how these things heal”.
So we’re hitting and I’m thinking. (and cue the sound of a penny slowly dropping).
“You broke your leg on this court?”
“Yeah, I just twisted round and, for some reason my leg got stuck”.
“It’s just there. You can still see it”.
And he pointed to a faded blotch on the floor. And it was just there. And you could still see it.
“There was blood everywhere. The bone snapped and went up through…”
“Blimey” I said, secretly thinking: Fantastic. He’s a raspberry. I’ll be home in time for EastEnders. “Are you OK?”
“Yes, I’m fine now, but it forced me to give up competitive squash”.
Forced me to give up competitive squash. As a psych-out, it was high art. One minute I was playing a hobbling cripple with a broken leg, the next I was up against the Roy Keane of squash. A competition standard player who’d risk life and limb for the glory of getting the ball back. Whose blood still marked the court. I looked at him. He looked kinda muscular. And his hair wasn’t thin, it was cropped. Curious how these things look different in a different light.
“Do you want to start?” he said.
“Might as well” I said. “EastEnders starts soon”.
9.30 and I’m upstairs, in the attic. Feeling sweaty, but smug and self-righteous. I’ve done 50 sit ups on one of those “abs buster” machines, I’ve lifted up those weights I bought in 1987 and I’ve had a wheat-free breakfast and a tablespoon of psyillican husks. I must be at least half a stone lighter already. Minimum.
You know what it’s like. It’s the summer. You get out your favourite summer suit, put it on and… So you say to yourself “I’m going to get fit. I’m going to take this in hand and do something about it.” Then you go to a lovely, shiny health club, hand over roughly the same amount of money that would otherwise buy you a small chateau and make the small but familiar joke: “Hah. I’ve only just joined and I’ve already lost a hundred pounds”. As gags, it’s up there with the vasectomy nurse who told me “You’ll just feel a small prick”, but hey.
Anyway. So I’m in the squash league. I used to play squash but that was back in the days when racquets were made of wood, not the titanium or schmitanium or whatever it is these things are made of now. Missed out graphite entirely. Now these things are so powerful they’ve had to introduce a new ball, also made of schmitanium to withstand the battering.
My first game, I bounded on to the court, head to toe in my virgin kit, which comes courtesy of my favourite designer, Primark. Total cost: £3.50.
The bloke I was playing looked OK. My kind of age, my kind of follicle count. We started hitting.
“I haven’t played for ages,” I said to him.
“Neither have I,” he said. “I haven’t stepped on this court since I broke my leg”.
“Blimey. Was that long ago? Are you OK?”
“Fine now. Amazing how these things heal”.
So we’re hitting and I’m thinking. (and cue the sound of a penny slowly dropping).
“You broke your leg on this court?”
“Yeah, I just twisted round and, for some reason my leg got stuck”.
“It’s just there. You can still see it”.
And he pointed to a faded blotch on the floor. And it was just there. And you could still see it.
“There was blood everywhere. The bone snapped and went up through…”
“Blimey” I said, secretly thinking: Fantastic. He’s a raspberry. I’ll be home in time for EastEnders. “Are you OK?”
“Yes, I’m fine now, but it forced me to give up competitive squash”.
Forced me to give up competitive squash. As a psych-out, it was high art. One minute I was playing a hobbling cripple with a broken leg, the next I was up against the Roy Keane of squash. A competition standard player who’d risk life and limb for the glory of getting the ball back. Whose blood still marked the court. I looked at him. He looked kinda muscular. And his hair wasn’t thin, it was cropped. Curious how these things look different in a different light.
“Do you want to start?” he said.
“Might as well” I said. “EastEnders starts soon”.
Friday, 17 October 2008
Other Room Services
CHAPTER 9: Other Room Services
Things had got off to a bad start. I'd asked the cabbie, some bloke I met at the train station, where a man would go to find some hookers. He said I should go and have a look at MFI. Momentarily, this bothered me. If he'd said that I should go to B&Q I could have rationalised it. Said that maybe he thought I'd said wanted some 'hooks'. But he'd said MFI. What did he think I want? How could he have mistaken 'hookers' for 'kitchen worktops? But... he didn't say I should go in MFI. He said I should go and have a look at MFI. Was it some kind of Midlands patois? Like in London people say that you should go and have 'a butcher's hook' when they mean a look, so maybe in Nottingham to 'go and have a look at MFI' meant something else. Then again, maybe it was just that our sexual tastes were very different. Whatever, it was clear that it wasn't going to be easy to throw myself into issues pertaining to the modern man.
Tomorrow I'm going to sit in a 'sweat lodge' (no I don't know what a sweat lodge is) with a group of men and discuss issues pertaining to the modern man. So I just figured that tonight I should swig Jack Daniels from the bottle in the company of a couple of local hookers while watching the hotel porn. Maybe I'll put a £20 note up my nose. That sounds like issues pertaining to the modern man covered. (I read the papers: I know what's going on). We're off to see The Vines and The Libertines in the appropriately named Rock City, two bands renowned for their interest in issues pertaining to the modern man.
The journey was a treat. One of those times in life when you wonder just how life could get any better. You know, you find yourself in situations which are just so perfect you wish there really was such a thing as a time machine and you could zap back in time to that school careers advisor and show him. "There! Told you I'd be OK" and he would shake his head in wonder and put his hands up in defeat. Mr Goldberg, I think that's what his name was, he was the careers advisor. He used to sit in his office and told us as we filed in, one by one like the passengers on some Noah's Ark that was en route for a dating party, "Ah yes. I've been looking at you and I think law would suit you. There's a course at Middlesex Polytechnic that's particularly good..." It didn't matter. Boy, girl. Blonde hair, dark hair. Thin, fat. Bright, stupid. It didn't matter. The law course at Middlesex Poly was perfect for us. Looking back, I can't remember whether I was secretly impressed by his candour or depressed by the dull predictability of it all when I found out that the admissions officer of The Law Faculty at Middlesex Poly was his best mate and that they'd done some sort of deal. Mr Goldberg. I wonder whatever happened to him. Died, I guess. Well, it was a while ago and he was about 70-odd. So maybe I don't even need a time machine. Maybe he's been reincarnated as that woman who's sitting opposite. She's about 20. Could be. Could be but I don't think I'm going to risk it. You and I might recognise that life really doesn't get any better than sitting at Bedford station on the delayed 14.55 to Nottingham listening to Phil Collins's new album (Testify on EastWest records for those currently compiling their Christmas present lists) but there's every chance that the 20-year-old female reincarnation of Mr Goldberg might be hoping for something more from life. Bloody lawyers.
I like these trips. They give me a chance to read newspapers, somerthing I've studiously avoided doing since I became a journalist. I've read red-tops, middle market papers and broadsheets. I bought Heat, The New Statesman and The Wire. We just passed Kettering and I've had to take off Phil Collins and put on Johnny Cash's new album (The Man Who Comes Around on Lost Highway records.) I've always thought of Kettering as a real Johnny Cash kinda place. All fire and brimstone and men in black hats. Anyway, The Wire was the only one which wasn't full of Angus and Mr X (who, for legal reasons, we shall call 'John Leslie'). The Statesman piece was by John Gray and frankly inelligible. It was three pages long but only had about five words. Five very long words. The sort of words you could take a break from reading, go off and cook a meal and come back and finish reading. Words that take longer to read than it takes to watch an episode of EastEnders (which I might stop watching if they get rid of Trevor). Lynda Lee Potter in The Mail was the best. I can't remember exactly what she said, but the gist of it was that 'John Leslie' should be made to sit at Bedford station on the delayed 14.55 to Nottingham and listen to Phil Collins's new album (Testify on EastWest records).
It never happened. I tried but it never happened. Forget the CitiLodge Hotel. OK, so it's central but listen. No mini bar. No Corby trouser press. And don't even think about your 10 minute freeview periods. There wasn't even a pay-for-view telly. Issues pertaining to the modern man? Issues schmissues.
Things had got off to a bad start. I'd asked the cabbie, some bloke I met at the train station, where a man would go to find some hookers. He said I should go and have a look at MFI. Momentarily, this bothered me. If he'd said that I should go to B&Q I could have rationalised it. Said that maybe he thought I'd said wanted some 'hooks'. But he'd said MFI. What did he think I want? How could he have mistaken 'hookers' for 'kitchen worktops? But... he didn't say I should go in MFI. He said I should go and have a look at MFI. Was it some kind of Midlands patois? Like in London people say that you should go and have 'a butcher's hook' when they mean a look, so maybe in Nottingham to 'go and have a look at MFI' meant something else. Then again, maybe it was just that our sexual tastes were very different. Whatever, it was clear that it wasn't going to be easy to throw myself into issues pertaining to the modern man.
Tomorrow I'm going to sit in a 'sweat lodge' (no I don't know what a sweat lodge is) with a group of men and discuss issues pertaining to the modern man. So I just figured that tonight I should swig Jack Daniels from the bottle in the company of a couple of local hookers while watching the hotel porn. Maybe I'll put a £20 note up my nose. That sounds like issues pertaining to the modern man covered. (I read the papers: I know what's going on). We're off to see The Vines and The Libertines in the appropriately named Rock City, two bands renowned for their interest in issues pertaining to the modern man.
The journey was a treat. One of those times in life when you wonder just how life could get any better. You know, you find yourself in situations which are just so perfect you wish there really was such a thing as a time machine and you could zap back in time to that school careers advisor and show him. "There! Told you I'd be OK" and he would shake his head in wonder and put his hands up in defeat. Mr Goldberg, I think that's what his name was, he was the careers advisor. He used to sit in his office and told us as we filed in, one by one like the passengers on some Noah's Ark that was en route for a dating party, "Ah yes. I've been looking at you and I think law would suit you. There's a course at Middlesex Polytechnic that's particularly good..." It didn't matter. Boy, girl. Blonde hair, dark hair. Thin, fat. Bright, stupid. It didn't matter. The law course at Middlesex Poly was perfect for us. Looking back, I can't remember whether I was secretly impressed by his candour or depressed by the dull predictability of it all when I found out that the admissions officer of The Law Faculty at Middlesex Poly was his best mate and that they'd done some sort of deal. Mr Goldberg. I wonder whatever happened to him. Died, I guess. Well, it was a while ago and he was about 70-odd. So maybe I don't even need a time machine. Maybe he's been reincarnated as that woman who's sitting opposite. She's about 20. Could be. Could be but I don't think I'm going to risk it. You and I might recognise that life really doesn't get any better than sitting at Bedford station on the delayed 14.55 to Nottingham listening to Phil Collins's new album (Testify on EastWest records for those currently compiling their Christmas present lists) but there's every chance that the 20-year-old female reincarnation of Mr Goldberg might be hoping for something more from life. Bloody lawyers.
I like these trips. They give me a chance to read newspapers, somerthing I've studiously avoided doing since I became a journalist. I've read red-tops, middle market papers and broadsheets. I bought Heat, The New Statesman and The Wire. We just passed Kettering and I've had to take off Phil Collins and put on Johnny Cash's new album (The Man Who Comes Around on Lost Highway records.) I've always thought of Kettering as a real Johnny Cash kinda place. All fire and brimstone and men in black hats. Anyway, The Wire was the only one which wasn't full of Angus and Mr X (who, for legal reasons, we shall call 'John Leslie'). The Statesman piece was by John Gray and frankly inelligible. It was three pages long but only had about five words. Five very long words. The sort of words you could take a break from reading, go off and cook a meal and come back and finish reading. Words that take longer to read than it takes to watch an episode of EastEnders (which I might stop watching if they get rid of Trevor). Lynda Lee Potter in The Mail was the best. I can't remember exactly what she said, but the gist of it was that 'John Leslie' should be made to sit at Bedford station on the delayed 14.55 to Nottingham and listen to Phil Collins's new album (Testify on EastWest records).
It never happened. I tried but it never happened. Forget the CitiLodge Hotel. OK, so it's central but listen. No mini bar. No Corby trouser press. And don't even think about your 10 minute freeview periods. There wasn't even a pay-for-view telly. Issues pertaining to the modern man? Issues schmissues.
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
September iPack
THE BLACK ALBUM
It was always going to be Paint It Black. There was never really a question, though there was a strange collision – collusion? – of the elements.
There was my mood.
There was my colour of choice.
There was the colour of the sky.
There was the summer.
There was my favourite music.
There was my mood.
There was a colour my bank manager had never seen.
Then there was the name of the first CD I’d bought for a good while – Black Sheep. I’ve always been a fan of Cope, from his early gorgeous pop to latterly his mad infatuations with stone circles – I went to Callanish last year, one of the maddest weekends – to his love of Krautrock – which ever since I heard Tago Mago in maybe 74 I’ve always loved – to his determination to do things his own way – which I’ve always aspired to though mostly lacked the balls to follow through with. He’s become interested in William Blake recently and the new CD is enriched by a Blake-ism: “Create your own system of become enslaved by another Man’s”.
Seems reasonable to me. (That’s actually also a Fall lyric, from Before The Moon Falls, Dragnet, 1979).
I always keep an eye on his Head Heritage website and when I read that he had a new album…
So I bought it. Of course, it’s largely bollocks – a double CD, natch - but that’s what happens when you release stuff yourself on your own label and there’s no one around, except maybe your kids, who’s gonna say “Actually, that’s bollocks”. But there are a few good things, especially the title All the blowing-themselves-up motherfuckers (will realise the minute they die that they were suckers)
So…
The Black Sheep's Song - Julian Cope
The Black Sheep’s Song is a lovely idea. “To rally every black sheep is my goal” it says on the album sleeve – and there are a fair few black sheep on this CD.
Am I Black Enough for You - Schoolly D
A proper bad man. Top tune though. I remember the NME tried to champion him in the early days – till they realised he was proper bad. Play this loud and it resonates big time.
Reverend Black Grape - Black Grape
Black Grape always get lost in the pipe smoke of the Mondays, but they made some great tunes. Back in the day I tried to commission Sean Ryder to write a piece called It’s Great When You’re Straight for The Observer. Don’t bother trying to find it on the web.
Black Heart - Keith Hudson
There’s a story about Keith Hudson. When Richard Branson was launching his Front Line series – what was that? 1976? – he went over to Jamaica to hang out with all these dudes that he’d signed up from the comfort of those Tubular Bells royalties. So Branson was playing the black man, giving it a load of I’n’I nonsense and they all played along with him cos he was paying them. Then he met Keith Hudson who’d had a huge success with a tune called Civilisation. Except Hudson was a proper job gangster who took one look at Branson, pulled a gun and gave him a count to get out.
These days Branson sponsors Andy Murray and Hudson is dead.
Good tune though, from a top album called Pick A Dub.
Black Erotica - Ursula Rucker
Mmmm. This one’s interesting. She’s an odd one, is our Ursula. Obsessed you might say. The only recording artist who washes their hands before and after.
Black Dog - Led Zeppelin
What else could follow that?
Black Monk Theme - The Fall
You probably haven’t heard of The Fall, but you’re gonna have to trust me on this one. This is a cover of a song called “I Hate You” by The Monks, a Nuggets-era bunch of tripped out psycho hippies. But it’s got the best lyrics ever and is the perfect riposte to Ursula Rucker.
You can look them up, but it’s funner (an old Ellie word) to listen and smile as you catch Smith bark
“Seep seep seep to sleep,
The drill scaffold starts
Power drill dog bark renovate stone blast
I'm coming
Because you make me hate you baby”
Black Coffee In Bed - Squeeze
Possibly the finest pop song ever written called Black Coffee In Bed. Actually you might argue those last five words are superfluous. Impossibly well crafted, it’s the form at it’s finest.
Black Tie White Noise (3rd Floor US Radio Mix) - David Bowie
Bowie’s most under-rated album. Every Bowie album past Scary Monsters has been
A) hailed as a return to form by pop hacks who know that if they don’t write that they won’t have an earthly of an interview and they’re all desperate for an interview because they, like the rest of the world, are huge Bowie fans and would sell their granny for a chance to break bread with the man.
B) Utter bollocks.
There have been the odd single and the odd flourish, but mainly it’s been a disappointment. I think it’s cos he started eating, but that’s another story.
Black Tie White Noise is the nearest he’s come.
Black Crow - Joni Mitchell
Something for Chris. A lovely tune from Hejira, Joni’s Golden Period.
Black Corridor – Hawkwind
More words of wisdom from Robert Calvert. It’s odd that the longer he goes on, the more he sounds like a Dalek.
Black Snake Moan - Blind Lemon Jefferson
Seemed reasonable to have some blues on a Stones-inspired CD.
Blacks/Radio - The Psychedelic Furs
Something for Tim. Actually I probably scagged this from one of Tim’s CD. Back in the pre first album time, they were actually quite good. When they were happy to be primitive. The voice is still grief.
Blacka Shade Of Dub - Scientist
Black Man Time - I Roy
Black Harmony Killer - Jah Stitch
Black Diamonds - Roland Kirk
A while back Johnski and I had a bit of an e-flurry about Rip, Rig & Panic, a bunch of honking, squonking post Pop Group ne’er do wells. They took their name from a Roland Kirk album and – guess what – this track comes from that album.
All the blowing-themselves-up motherfuckers (will realise the minute they die that they were suckers) - Julian Cope
He’s probably got a point, you gotta admit.
Paint it Black - Metallica
I found a few mad versions of the tune – Rammstein were good, as was an unnamed German techno version, U2 was straight bollocks – but this I liked. Cos it’s so horrible.
It was always going to be Paint It Black. There was never really a question, though there was a strange collision – collusion? – of the elements.
There was my mood.
There was my colour of choice.
There was the colour of the sky.
There was the summer.
There was my favourite music.
There was my mood.
There was a colour my bank manager had never seen.
Then there was the name of the first CD I’d bought for a good while – Black Sheep. I’ve always been a fan of Cope, from his early gorgeous pop to latterly his mad infatuations with stone circles – I went to Callanish last year, one of the maddest weekends – to his love of Krautrock – which ever since I heard Tago Mago in maybe 74 I’ve always loved – to his determination to do things his own way – which I’ve always aspired to though mostly lacked the balls to follow through with. He’s become interested in William Blake recently and the new CD is enriched by a Blake-ism: “Create your own system of become enslaved by another Man’s”.
Seems reasonable to me. (That’s actually also a Fall lyric, from Before The Moon Falls, Dragnet, 1979).
I always keep an eye on his Head Heritage website and when I read that he had a new album…
So I bought it. Of course, it’s largely bollocks – a double CD, natch - but that’s what happens when you release stuff yourself on your own label and there’s no one around, except maybe your kids, who’s gonna say “Actually, that’s bollocks”. But there are a few good things, especially the title All the blowing-themselves-up motherfuckers (will realise the minute they die that they were suckers)
So…
The Black Sheep's Song - Julian Cope
The Black Sheep’s Song is a lovely idea. “To rally every black sheep is my goal” it says on the album sleeve – and there are a fair few black sheep on this CD.
Am I Black Enough for You - Schoolly D
A proper bad man. Top tune though. I remember the NME tried to champion him in the early days – till they realised he was proper bad. Play this loud and it resonates big time.
Reverend Black Grape - Black Grape
Black Grape always get lost in the pipe smoke of the Mondays, but they made some great tunes. Back in the day I tried to commission Sean Ryder to write a piece called It’s Great When You’re Straight for The Observer. Don’t bother trying to find it on the web.
Black Heart - Keith Hudson
There’s a story about Keith Hudson. When Richard Branson was launching his Front Line series – what was that? 1976? – he went over to Jamaica to hang out with all these dudes that he’d signed up from the comfort of those Tubular Bells royalties. So Branson was playing the black man, giving it a load of I’n’I nonsense and they all played along with him cos he was paying them. Then he met Keith Hudson who’d had a huge success with a tune called Civilisation. Except Hudson was a proper job gangster who took one look at Branson, pulled a gun and gave him a count to get out.
These days Branson sponsors Andy Murray and Hudson is dead.
Good tune though, from a top album called Pick A Dub.
Black Erotica - Ursula Rucker
Mmmm. This one’s interesting. She’s an odd one, is our Ursula. Obsessed you might say. The only recording artist who washes their hands before and after.
Black Dog - Led Zeppelin
What else could follow that?
Black Monk Theme - The Fall
You probably haven’t heard of The Fall, but you’re gonna have to trust me on this one. This is a cover of a song called “I Hate You” by The Monks, a Nuggets-era bunch of tripped out psycho hippies. But it’s got the best lyrics ever and is the perfect riposte to Ursula Rucker.
You can look them up, but it’s funner (an old Ellie word) to listen and smile as you catch Smith bark
“Seep seep seep to sleep,
The drill scaffold starts
Power drill dog bark renovate stone blast
I'm coming
Because you make me hate you baby”
Black Coffee In Bed - Squeeze
Possibly the finest pop song ever written called Black Coffee In Bed. Actually you might argue those last five words are superfluous. Impossibly well crafted, it’s the form at it’s finest.
Black Tie White Noise (3rd Floor US Radio Mix) - David Bowie
Bowie’s most under-rated album. Every Bowie album past Scary Monsters has been
A) hailed as a return to form by pop hacks who know that if they don’t write that they won’t have an earthly of an interview and they’re all desperate for an interview because they, like the rest of the world, are huge Bowie fans and would sell their granny for a chance to break bread with the man.
B) Utter bollocks.
There have been the odd single and the odd flourish, but mainly it’s been a disappointment. I think it’s cos he started eating, but that’s another story.
Black Tie White Noise is the nearest he’s come.
Black Crow - Joni Mitchell
Something for Chris. A lovely tune from Hejira, Joni’s Golden Period.
Black Corridor – Hawkwind
More words of wisdom from Robert Calvert. It’s odd that the longer he goes on, the more he sounds like a Dalek.
Black Snake Moan - Blind Lemon Jefferson
Seemed reasonable to have some blues on a Stones-inspired CD.
Blacks/Radio - The Psychedelic Furs
Something for Tim. Actually I probably scagged this from one of Tim’s CD. Back in the pre first album time, they were actually quite good. When they were happy to be primitive. The voice is still grief.
Blacka Shade Of Dub - Scientist
Black Man Time - I Roy
Black Harmony Killer - Jah Stitch
Black Diamonds - Roland Kirk
A while back Johnski and I had a bit of an e-flurry about Rip, Rig & Panic, a bunch of honking, squonking post Pop Group ne’er do wells. They took their name from a Roland Kirk album and – guess what – this track comes from that album.
All the blowing-themselves-up motherfuckers (will realise the minute they die that they were suckers) - Julian Cope
He’s probably got a point, you gotta admit.
Paint it Black - Metallica
I found a few mad versions of the tune – Rammstein were good, as was an unnamed German techno version, U2 was straight bollocks – but this I liked. Cos it’s so horrible.
Sunday, 7 September 2008
My summer
This is how my summer has been
A few weeks ago, I decided to sell my car. I liked the car, I liked enough that – and I only thought about this later – when Ellie once idly asked me what was the best car I ever had, I thought a bit and said “This one”. Still, a few weeks ago I decided to sell the car. It was a big 2.6 litre beast, lovely to drive but very expensive to run. In the time I had it, just over a year, the cost of filling it up had gone up over £25. The eco jihad? No, it just cost a lot.
I bought the car for £2,200 so I decided to sell it for the same. If it didn’t go… well, at least I tried.
On August 20 – an auspicious date as you’ll find out – I received an e-mail from Ebay saying that the car had sold. For £2,200. I sent the buyer a mail. A nice bloke called Chris who, curiously, worked for an internet TV station for chartered accountants. He was from New Zealand. That was a Wednesday. We arranged for him to come to Lewes station on Friday – they were doing a special on tax evasion on Thursday – and all was good.
On Thursday I got in the car, pressed the button that operated the driver’s window. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. It was broke. I took the car to the garage.
“Ah yes, you see it’s the motor. The whole thing will have to be replaced.”
“Blimey. Are you sure?”
“And of course the exhaust system.”
“Of course.”
£300. Plus VAT. It couldn’t have broken down a day later? It had worked perfectly all the time I had the car and that Thursday it broke.
That was how my summer has been.
This is how my summer has been
College finished. I got it done. Out of the way. I talked with Gill about the work I had to do over the summer. The projects. The ideas. The summer was full of potential, full of possibilities.
We had some friends round for Sunday lunch. It was, strangely for this summer, a lovely day. We were sitting on our deck with Fred and Sue – I’ll tell you about them later – and, as usual they were having a conversation at us when, kinda innocently, a wasp started bussing around my head.
Not even thinking about it, I waved it away, just like I’ve done a thousand times before. This time though was different. This time, as I waved, the wasp waved. We waved at each other. With each other. And, like old school rappers, we gave each other a high five. Well, I gave the wasp a high five. The wasp gave me a sting. On my hand. My right hand. The right hand which is the only hand I type with.
That wasn’t the bad thing. The bad thing was this. I had an allergic reaction to the sting. My hand blew up in an almost Elephant Man style. People looked at my hand like it was some Victorian curio. My rings got stuck. Not only did it hurt – and it did - I couldn’t move my hand or my fingers. For two weeks.
I’d never been stung before.
This is how my summer has been
Gill and I have been married, give or take, 13 years and five months. To someone who’s been married, say, 20 years that might not be much, but to someone who’s been married maybe just two years, it’s a lifetime.
People say to us “How do you keep yoiur marriage alive?” and we tell them of our devices. We even appeared in The Very Fine Daily Mail – a double page feature complete with photo shoot – talking about how we keep our marriage alive, how we keep the romance in our world.
Not long after we first got together, before we were married and before we even spoke of children, I packed a couple of bags, put Gill and Maxwell in the car, blindfolded the two of them – he was a terrible sneak – and took them off for a mystery weekend in The Isle Of Wight.
Since then, we’ve taken each other all over the world on mystery trips, the game being to see how far you can get the other person before they find out where they’re going. (Headphones and blindfolds are useful but you can’t stop idiot passengers reading The Time Out Guide Book To Rome or some idiot hostess declaring “Welcome to Nice”.)
Anyway, it’s been a bit of a summer and that’s brought on its own stresses so it was only a question of time before one of us declared “We’re going away next weekend, I’m not telling you where”. Gill arranged it. I was probably talking to mortgage advisors or legal solicitors or banks or bail bond bounty hunters.
We packed up the car – two adults, three children, three dogs, all our clothes and dog baskets, tenths, sleeping bags, duvets, pillows… With Gill you never know. I guessed we weren’t going to Prague but all the baggage really might have been a distraction.
Now then. My sister moved to Bournemouth in 1979, my mother moved in 1984 and I’ve been going down there every few weeks/ months since then. I’ve always been intrigued by a sign just by the New Forest which says “No Right Turn Till Rufus Stone”. What or who is Rufus Stone? What happens there? What might happen if you turned right before Rufus Stone? There are more questions than answers.
Anyway, so we’re driving along on the way to our mystery location, heading towards Bournemouth. Through the New Forest. Towards the sign. I’m driving. Gill’s saying “Left” or “Right”.
Gill says “Turn right at Rufus Stone”.
The weekend could only be fantastic. It could only be a treat. What happened was t his.
We pitched up at a camp site. Great. I’ve never been camping in a camp site.
Thye camp site is called Sandy Balls. Great. How many cheap gags to make the kids laugh can you get out of Sandy Balls?
It’s full of kids and dogs. Perfect.
What happened was this.
We made camp at around 5pm. We had a walk. I got hit by my mystery stomach condition. I was taken to Salisbury Hospital. I stayed there until Sunday afternoon when, car packed, Gill, the kids and the dogs came to pick me up and take me home.
On the way home, the girls said to me “Mummy was drinking wine outside the tent by herself”.
I’ve got to go to hospital on Sept 19th to have a cameradownthethroatoscopy.
“Is it going to hurt?” I said, like a true 50-year-old man.
“No, we’ll give you something that’ll send you away with the fairies.”
Grab that silver lining, I thought. Normally it costs me about £50 to go play with those guys.
This is how my summer has been
The mortgage went up £500 a month.
We decided we couldn't stay in the house.
We swung a deal.
We stayed in the house.
The deal went flat.
We couldn’t stay in the house.
That’s as much as I’m going to say about that.
But this is the thing. Then I sorted us out a deal to stay in the house. It’s not cheap, but we can manage it.
We’re staying in the house.
There have been a lot of ups and downs. Conversations around the table. Trips to London. E-mails with people who were probably wearing suits, the type you wear with your shirt tucked in and your stomach hanging out.
It's been difficult but we're staying in the house.
This is how my summer has been
My mother died.
That’s as much as I’m going to say about that one.
She’d been ill for a long time and many times I wished – for all our sakes – that she slip away.
She used to say to me “I wish I was on the top of a big slide and I could just slide…”
She’d started to call me Liam. Quite why this woman – born in Whitechapel of Polish immigrant stock and Jewish through and through should conjure up the name Liam… Who can say. I asked her once. She looked at me like I was an idiot. That’s when I thought she was going to live forever.
But she died. And you know what? It hurts more than the wasp sting and is more disorientating than the house business.
My mother died. On August 18.
On August 20 - Ellie's birthday, a day she'd been looking for f'ages - my mother had her funeral.
August 20. Ellie's birthday. Gill's parents' wedding anniversary. My mother's funeral. All of life.
This is how my summer has been
As I was driving from Laughton to Bournemouth after being told about my mother, I realised the curious ramification of her passing.
We wouldn’t be able to stay in the house. The detail is too sordid to go into here, but that’s the story.
We’re not staying in the house.
This is how my summer has been
I was going to turn 50 this summer. I knew it was coming – it’s not like you don’t get notification – so I decided to embrace it. I’d do what I do. I’d have a party. I was going to have a big party. I was going to be 50 – it wasn’t going to be me, you know what I mean?
We were going to have a theme party – 1973. It was my 50th, Ellie’s 13th and LouLou’s 10th. 73. (Quite how LouLou has got to 10… that’s another story).
People were coming from far and wide. They were going to camp. It would be a mini festival – just like our wedding renewal party – minus the guitar stomping.
We weren’t going to have a summer holiday – our money was going on the house, remember – and the weather had been appalling and our attempts at mystery romantic weekends had ended up in hospital, but we were going to have a big party.
The week before The Big Party… my mother died. I cancelled the party. It’s not that it didn’t seem right, it’s just that I couldn’t do it. I’d bought a massive version of the game Twister but I couldn’t do it.
Maybe we’ll do it later.
A few weeks ago, I decided to sell my car. I liked the car, I liked enough that – and I only thought about this later – when Ellie once idly asked me what was the best car I ever had, I thought a bit and said “This one”. Still, a few weeks ago I decided to sell the car. It was a big 2.6 litre beast, lovely to drive but very expensive to run. In the time I had it, just over a year, the cost of filling it up had gone up over £25. The eco jihad? No, it just cost a lot.
I bought the car for £2,200 so I decided to sell it for the same. If it didn’t go… well, at least I tried.
On August 20 – an auspicious date as you’ll find out – I received an e-mail from Ebay saying that the car had sold. For £2,200. I sent the buyer a mail. A nice bloke called Chris who, curiously, worked for an internet TV station for chartered accountants. He was from New Zealand. That was a Wednesday. We arranged for him to come to Lewes station on Friday – they were doing a special on tax evasion on Thursday – and all was good.
On Thursday I got in the car, pressed the button that operated the driver’s window. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. It was broke. I took the car to the garage.
“Ah yes, you see it’s the motor. The whole thing will have to be replaced.”
“Blimey. Are you sure?”
“And of course the exhaust system.”
“Of course.”
£300. Plus VAT. It couldn’t have broken down a day later? It had worked perfectly all the time I had the car and that Thursday it broke.
That was how my summer has been.
This is how my summer has been
College finished. I got it done. Out of the way. I talked with Gill about the work I had to do over the summer. The projects. The ideas. The summer was full of potential, full of possibilities.
We had some friends round for Sunday lunch. It was, strangely for this summer, a lovely day. We were sitting on our deck with Fred and Sue – I’ll tell you about them later – and, as usual they were having a conversation at us when, kinda innocently, a wasp started bussing around my head.
Not even thinking about it, I waved it away, just like I’ve done a thousand times before. This time though was different. This time, as I waved, the wasp waved. We waved at each other. With each other. And, like old school rappers, we gave each other a high five. Well, I gave the wasp a high five. The wasp gave me a sting. On my hand. My right hand. The right hand which is the only hand I type with.
That wasn’t the bad thing. The bad thing was this. I had an allergic reaction to the sting. My hand blew up in an almost Elephant Man style. People looked at my hand like it was some Victorian curio. My rings got stuck. Not only did it hurt – and it did - I couldn’t move my hand or my fingers. For two weeks.
I’d never been stung before.
This is how my summer has been
Gill and I have been married, give or take, 13 years and five months. To someone who’s been married, say, 20 years that might not be much, but to someone who’s been married maybe just two years, it’s a lifetime.
People say to us “How do you keep yoiur marriage alive?” and we tell them of our devices. We even appeared in The Very Fine Daily Mail – a double page feature complete with photo shoot – talking about how we keep our marriage alive, how we keep the romance in our world.
Not long after we first got together, before we were married and before we even spoke of children, I packed a couple of bags, put Gill and Maxwell in the car, blindfolded the two of them – he was a terrible sneak – and took them off for a mystery weekend in The Isle Of Wight.
Since then, we’ve taken each other all over the world on mystery trips, the game being to see how far you can get the other person before they find out where they’re going. (Headphones and blindfolds are useful but you can’t stop idiot passengers reading The Time Out Guide Book To Rome or some idiot hostess declaring “Welcome to Nice”.)
Anyway, it’s been a bit of a summer and that’s brought on its own stresses so it was only a question of time before one of us declared “We’re going away next weekend, I’m not telling you where”. Gill arranged it. I was probably talking to mortgage advisors or legal solicitors or banks or bail bond bounty hunters.
We packed up the car – two adults, three children, three dogs, all our clothes and dog baskets, tenths, sleeping bags, duvets, pillows… With Gill you never know. I guessed we weren’t going to Prague but all the baggage really might have been a distraction.
Now then. My sister moved to Bournemouth in 1979, my mother moved in 1984 and I’ve been going down there every few weeks/ months since then. I’ve always been intrigued by a sign just by the New Forest which says “No Right Turn Till Rufus Stone”. What or who is Rufus Stone? What happens there? What might happen if you turned right before Rufus Stone? There are more questions than answers.
Anyway, so we’re driving along on the way to our mystery location, heading towards Bournemouth. Through the New Forest. Towards the sign. I’m driving. Gill’s saying “Left” or “Right”.
Gill says “Turn right at Rufus Stone”.
The weekend could only be fantastic. It could only be a treat. What happened was t his.
We pitched up at a camp site. Great. I’ve never been camping in a camp site.
Thye camp site is called Sandy Balls. Great. How many cheap gags to make the kids laugh can you get out of Sandy Balls?
It’s full of kids and dogs. Perfect.
What happened was this.
We made camp at around 5pm. We had a walk. I got hit by my mystery stomach condition. I was taken to Salisbury Hospital. I stayed there until Sunday afternoon when, car packed, Gill, the kids and the dogs came to pick me up and take me home.
On the way home, the girls said to me “Mummy was drinking wine outside the tent by herself”.
I’ve got to go to hospital on Sept 19th to have a cameradownthethroatoscopy.
“Is it going to hurt?” I said, like a true 50-year-old man.
“No, we’ll give you something that’ll send you away with the fairies.”
Grab that silver lining, I thought. Normally it costs me about £50 to go play with those guys.
This is how my summer has been
The mortgage went up £500 a month.
We decided we couldn't stay in the house.
We swung a deal.
We stayed in the house.
The deal went flat.
We couldn’t stay in the house.
That’s as much as I’m going to say about that.
But this is the thing. Then I sorted us out a deal to stay in the house. It’s not cheap, but we can manage it.
We’re staying in the house.
There have been a lot of ups and downs. Conversations around the table. Trips to London. E-mails with people who were probably wearing suits, the type you wear with your shirt tucked in and your stomach hanging out.
It's been difficult but we're staying in the house.
This is how my summer has been
My mother died.
That’s as much as I’m going to say about that one.
She’d been ill for a long time and many times I wished – for all our sakes – that she slip away.
She used to say to me “I wish I was on the top of a big slide and I could just slide…”
She’d started to call me Liam. Quite why this woman – born in Whitechapel of Polish immigrant stock and Jewish through and through should conjure up the name Liam… Who can say. I asked her once. She looked at me like I was an idiot. That’s when I thought she was going to live forever.
But she died. And you know what? It hurts more than the wasp sting and is more disorientating than the house business.
My mother died. On August 18.
On August 20 - Ellie's birthday, a day she'd been looking for f'ages - my mother had her funeral.
August 20. Ellie's birthday. Gill's parents' wedding anniversary. My mother's funeral. All of life.
This is how my summer has been
As I was driving from Laughton to Bournemouth after being told about my mother, I realised the curious ramification of her passing.
We wouldn’t be able to stay in the house. The detail is too sordid to go into here, but that’s the story.
We’re not staying in the house.
This is how my summer has been
I was going to turn 50 this summer. I knew it was coming – it’s not like you don’t get notification – so I decided to embrace it. I’d do what I do. I’d have a party. I was going to have a big party. I was going to be 50 – it wasn’t going to be me, you know what I mean?
We were going to have a theme party – 1973. It was my 50th, Ellie’s 13th and LouLou’s 10th. 73. (Quite how LouLou has got to 10… that’s another story).
People were coming from far and wide. They were going to camp. It would be a mini festival – just like our wedding renewal party – minus the guitar stomping.
We weren’t going to have a summer holiday – our money was going on the house, remember – and the weather had been appalling and our attempts at mystery romantic weekends had ended up in hospital, but we were going to have a big party.
The week before The Big Party… my mother died. I cancelled the party. It’s not that it didn’t seem right, it’s just that I couldn’t do it. I’d bought a massive version of the game Twister but I couldn’t do it.
Maybe we’ll do it later.
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