Archive for the ‘brenda’ Category
elvis, orpheus, and the panopticon
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their
silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is
conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing;
but from their silence certainly never.
Franz Kafka
There’s nothing you can’t buy at Al’s Video’s in Ashington. It is a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of a shop, a cornucopia of the mundane and the outlandish, the exotic and the ordinary. It’s a Tardis-like shop that somehow contains more space than it occupies. It stands on North Seaton Road, a little way around the Grand Corner from the town centre. Next to Pal Joey’s and Lintonville Fabrics, the curtain shop. Lily once told me she’d bought four exquisite inflatable golden giraffes there. Pippa swears by it for everything from birthday cards to bubble wrap. It’s the sort of haberdashery where you’d get a harpoon if you needed one, the sort of junkshop where you might find magic butterflies among silver confetti. Debs told me once she got a rainbow-coloured paper suit there, good enough to wear for court. On another occasion she got herself a fine lightweight wheelbarrow made from recycled lemonade cans. Last Thursday I went over to Al’s in search of brightly coloured foam letters and card to make a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign with, along with some sky blue ribbon to hang it by. I found what I wanted next to some luminous plastic skeletons. As I was making my way back down South View I met up with Owen Vardy, carrier bag in hand.
‘So what’s in the bag this time, Owen?’ I said. ‘More vitamins?’
He chuckled. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Just a few things for my holidays. My wife Heidi and I are going over to the Lakes for a week at the weekend. We always rent a lovely little apartment in Portinscale called The Leveret’s Relief. We stay there every year.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘So what have you got in the bag, energy bars and stuff?’
‘No, I’ve got some fruit for the first few days, just in case local supplies aren’t available. Heidi and I have got to have our antioxidants, you know.’
‘So what have you got, apples and oranges and that sort of thing?’
‘Berries. Berries are the best thing. I’ve got strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, bilberries, blueberries and red grapes. I’ve also got some nuts – walnuts and almonds – along with flax and sunflower seeds. I’ve got a couple of nice pomegranates, some tomatoes, broccoli, kiwi fruit and spinach. I’ve got baby leaf herb salad. Oh, and an avocado and some Brussel’s sprouts. And a beetroot. And some sprouting seeds.’
I looked down at Owen’s carrier bag. Al’s Video Shop suddenly began to seem quite ordinary.
‘That’s quite a shop,’ I said.
‘Well, you can’t take any risks with your health, can you? And as we all know, you are what you eat. You’re a vegetarian too, aren’t you?’ he asked.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Does it show?’
‘I think if more people knew the dangers of eating meat the whole country would soon be vegetarian,’ he said. ‘Don’t you? As Heidi always says, the sausage and the steak are sure-fire short cuts to an early grave.’ I nodded slowly. Heidi’s phrase had a definite prophetic, even Blakeian ring to it. Owen was wearing a long brown jacket, blue corduroy trousers and an open-necked white linen shirt, all hanging loosely on him, as if they were all a size too big, and all somehow wrinkled and in need of an iron. He seemed to be expecting me to continue the conversation. I took a predictable turn.
‘How’s Jack?’ I asked.
Owen’s expression froze. He leaned close, like a sort of spectral Columbo.
‘To be honest, I despair of that man,’ he replied. His expression was one of studied incredulity. ‘He appears to care so little about his dignity. You’ll know about the motorbike, of course, and that he insists that everyone should now call him Spider. Well, now he’s dyed his hair jet black, blacker than a raven, tarantula black. It’s a terrible thing to say but when I first saw it he reminded me of Ozzie Osbourne. You do know he was born on the same day as me, don’t you?’
‘Who was, Ozzie Osbourne?’
‘No, Jack.’
‘Oh yes, I knew that.’
‘Well, I ask you, is it in any way dignified for a man of his age to dye his hair black like that. Who does he think he is – Elvis Presley, Alice Cooper, Michael Jackson? I ask you, who?’
‘Maybe dignity’s not something that bothers Jack much these days,’ I said.
‘Ah, but it does,’ Owen replied, quick as a flash, putting his hand on my arm like a monkey’s claw. ‘There is not a man alive who doesn’t seek dignity. Believe me, I know. Dignity is truth, and Jack is seeking dignity just as much as you or I, my friend. But he’s taken the wrong road, I fear, and for him there may be no way back.’
I smiled. I was wondering if there was anything in what Owen was saying. I was thinking about how a man might deal with temptation. I was thinking about beeswax and the lyre. If Owen was Ulysses I was wondering if Jack might not be Orpheus.
‘So what’s happening on the Jack and Tallulah front?’ I said. ‘Has she ridden in red leather on his black pillion yet?’
Owen shook his head, as if the very thought of it in some way ruffled the soft white feathers of his soul. ‘No,’ he said, gravely. ‘Not yet. And we can only pray that she never does.’ He paused. Again he looked troubled, like a heron in a storm.
‘What are you saying?’ I asked, ‘that she might be up for it?’
He looked me straight in the eye, as a priest might look at a heathen. ‘Women are strange creatures,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you that. And Tallulah is a woman.’
I sort of already knew he’d noticed that, of course, although I still wasn’t absolutely sure how much attention his all too human flesh was allowed to pay to this fact. I could now hear our leather-clad siren singing to him. I could see him sailing by, lashed to the mast, his ears stuffed with dignity
‘I don’t really want to talk about it,’ he said, suddenly almost composed. ‘I can’t. It’s wrong in any case. But Jack’s life is his own, Tallulah’s too. That’s something we must all accept.’
I nodded. ‘So you’re off to the Lakes, eh? Lucky man. Hey, have you ever heard the story of Florence Nelson from Bowness? She was known as The Steamroller Murderess, it seems.’
‘Florence Nelson?’ Owen said, looking up quickly. ‘No. No, I’ve never heard of her. When did all this happen?’
‘Oh it was probably about fifty years ago now,’ I said. ‘In the sixties, I think. Any way, listen, if you do get into a conversation with any of the locals while you’re over there, ask them about it, will you? I only know bits of the story and I’m sort of intrigued to find out the rest.’
‘Yes, I will do that,’ Owen said. ‘I’d like to know about it myself. Anyhow, time marches on, I really must fly or I’ll miss my bus.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Just one more thing – you and Heidi don’t have any children, do you?’
‘No, we don’t. We were never blessed that way. Why do you ask?’
‘I just wondered. Does Jack have any kids?’
‘Not officially, no. However the story does go round that he has a son who he has never seen since he was a baby. They say that the mother might be someone quite famous, a singer. My own guess is that he doesn’t have a son at all and it’s just something he made up to make himself more interesting. If he does have a son my guess is that the mother will probably have been a groupie or some other woman he hardly knew. You know Jack.’
‘Maybe it was Janis Joplin,’ I said. ‘Maybe Jack and Janis had a secret love child. Maybe they called him Jimi. Anyhow, Owen, enjoy your holiday. And don’t forget to ask about steamroller murderess if you get the chance.’
I watched him as he turned the corner on his way to the bus station. I really must find time to read George Herbert, I thought.
I had mushroom pizza for tea that night and then went out for walk. As I walked up past the first houses on Cowpen Road opposite Sure Start I looked up at the massive steroidal three-headed CCTV lamppost at the junction with Albion Way. There are a surprising number of these things around Blyth. I’ve read somewhere that the police have nineteen CCTV cameras in Blyth town centre alone and there are clearly many others elsewhere, such as this one at the junction of Albion Way. In fact I’d already walked past another of these Medusas, the one that looks down on us from the top of Waterloo Road. For some reason I’d taken no notice of it as I passed.
There is nothing benign about being watched. All surveillance is coercive. We are all wearing a t-shirt with “SUSPECT” written across the chest. (It’s probably the same t-shirt the government gave us all, the one with “VICTIM” written on the back.) What I wonder is if we haven’t done anything wrong why are they watching us? To make sure we can’t, or to make sure that if we do we will, in Foucault’s famous formulation, be disciplined and punished, I suppose.
I walked along past Au Naturel and Morpeth Road School towards the North Farm and KwikFit, where there’s another gigantic forbidding three-eyed monster at the junction of Hodgsons Road. In fact Cowpen Quay is supervised by several of these massive inscrutable swivel-headed wardens. The estate is surrounded by these silent Gorgons. It is of course the poorest area of Blyth and has long had a reputation for crime and drug use. These things haven’t stopped of course, it’s just that they now happen indoors, or elsewhere. I walked on past Netto and up towards Cowpen Cemetary, wondering just how many CCTV cameras there actually are in Blyth, wondering if one could see me now. I was thinking it would be a good idea to map them and to try to find which areas of the town aren’t covered by them, to chart those streets down which a citizen can still walk without being regarded as a suspect. It would be good if there were maps like this on the internet of every town in the UK, showing us the places where we can still feel free.
It’s increasingly hard to believe there is anywhere left in Britain where we aren’t being watched. We’re getting to the point where CCTV is so ubiquitous we don’t even know it’s there. But if that meant we weren’t responding to its presence there’d be no point in it being there at all. The truth is we must now assume we are always being watched. We live beneath the mute soulless gaze of a host of invisible God-like controllers who we must imagine track every step we take. We must know we are not free. There’s something so sinister and feudal and oppressive about those spaces we used to think were ours. Invisible assumed surveillance has taken root in our unconscious, like an imaginary malignant metaphysical presence. This is the psychology of the Panopticon. Irrationality now lurks around every street corner. A new dark age awaits us. Paranoia and morbid dread are key phenomenological characteristics of existence in twenty-first century urban environments. I wanted to ask Gordon if he expects things to get worse. I wanted to ask him if we wanted to say sorry.
When I got home I glanced up at Hugo’s little security cameras. I waved at them as they gazed relentlessly at the junk in his front garden – the old car wheels, the stunted conifers in their pots, the oven hob, the sheets of plasterboard, the orange Bond Bug that glows like a jelly in the twilight. I felt an impulse to vault over the fence and steal something, just to see if I would get away with it, just to see if there was anyone really watching me at all.
It was Easter weekend. It was good to get a few days off work. I painted a bit and did some walking and biking. With De Kooning’s help I did some pruning and pulled up a few weeds in the garden.
On Sunday I decided to go up to Thrunton Woods to walk. I asked Margaret for a garlic clove before I went but she refused to give me one. As I drove up I listened to Elvis Perkins’ new album, Elvis Perkins in Dearland. I thought it was oddly appropriate for a trip to Thrunton. The album was initially a bit of a disappointment to me. I thought it didn’t really come up to the standard of his first album, which I think is one of the best singer-songwriter albums of recent years. Mr Perkins, son of Anthony of Psycho fame, has an elegantly intelligent lyrical imagination and a loose freewheeling vocal style. While being inescapably American and showing a clear debt to Bob Dylan and other North American influences, he also seems to have a distinct dash of European-ness about him, making him sound distinctively cosmopolitan. The new album starts well and the first four songs are very engaging. The opening song in particular has a popish immediacy as well as slyly deceptive lyrical turns. The final songs are strong too. So for me at present the problem is somewhere in the middle, probably around song six. Somewhere around about there he overdoes it a bit, becomes a bit too mannered. Cabaret comes to mind, or maybe the Danse Macabre, something Gothy. Late Beatles circus tent burlesque stuff, a bit like For the Benefit of Mr Kite but without the tune. There’s something just a little too theatrical and artificial going on around here for my liking.
It was cool but the sky was clear and blue. I parked at the top of the woods and set off along the forest road up towards Coe Crag. There were very few people around and for the most part I had the place to myself. The larches were beginning to get their fresh bright green needles. Small birds were chittering among them. As I made it on to the open moor a buzzard slid north far above me. I walked on up to the trig point on Long Crag. I sat down on a stone near there and gazed for a while over the valley and the woods to the hills beyond. Not a trace of snow remained on Cheviot.
I continued west from the trig point and then descended into the valley on the well worn rocky track. I crossed the burn and made my way up through the woods toward the Black Walter forest road. There are secret mountain bike tracks through these woods, trails few other people even know exist. They are like wormholes through the dense homogeneous fabric of the forest and often come out at quite unexpected places. I entered one of the longest, just north of the final ninety degree corner on the long climb. The track wriggles and slithers through the dense conifers all the way back down to the valley, emerging behind the big Scots pine tree near the footbridge. I crossed the bridge and made the long climb back up through the woods and then on up to the huge Coe Crag cairn, where I sat for a while to catch my breath, say goodbye to Cheviot, and lie for a while in the old heather gazing at the sky’s blueness. I didn’t see a single deer during my walk. I hadn’t needed the garlic after all.
I drove south listening to Dearland again. I left the A1 at Blagdon. As I was driving up past the estate wall a Mephisto Travel minibus went past me going the other way. Ahead of me a deep red Honda Civic was turning on to the Cramlington Road. I turned left and found myself following it. It was Brenda’s new car. She was alone. I followed her as far as the Target roundabout, where she took the exit down towards the village while I went north towards Plessey Checks. She hadn’t noticed me behind her.
It could have just been a coincidence, of course. As Brenda says, such things do happen. But my guess was this was no coincidence. A pound to a penny says the driver of the minibus was Elvis Devlin.
When I got home Margaret was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table doing a jigsaw while waiting for an onion tart to cook. I thought about mentioning my little chance encounter to her. But I didn’t, and I don’t think I will. It’s not really any of my business.
That night I read some of Michael Donaghy’s Collected Poems. He’s described in the slip jacket blurb as “a modern metaphysical”, and it isn’t difficult to see why, although it’s impossible to pretend he’s George Herbert, of course. Nevertheless he has an intellectual cleverness and poise which makes the description reasonable. If I’m honest I find his stuff often a bit austere and lacking in sensual richness, but many of his poems are witty, rewarding and thought-provoking. Here’s one I like. It’s called “Meridian”.
There are two kinds of people in the world. Roughly. First there are the kind who say ‘There are two kinds of people in the world.’ And then there’s those that don’t. Me, I live smack on the borderline, Where the road ends with towers and searchlights, And we’re kept awake all night by the creak of the barrier Rising and falling like Occam’s razor.
Donaghy was an American who moved to London in the nineteen eighties and wrote much of his work over here. He died in 2004, aged only fifty. There are many who lament his passing.
I finally had a stab a doing a painting of Newsham this week. I used another of my 16″ x 16″ Loxley canvasses. I did a view of The Newsham pub and the roundabout in front of it. I initially painted it monochromatically, in Prussian blue and white. I then added areas of raw sienna as a warm counterpoint. I broke with this rather subdued palette only for the shop front of Tanz-N-Here, where I used vermillion and chrome yellow. It seems to work. It reminds me of Lowry in its limited palette and its simplified urban landscape. It’s a bit more expressionistic than Lowry, however. I pondered a lot about whether to add any figures. I didn’t think I should. Their absence gives the place a more existential focus. It asks the question “what kind of people live here or used to live here?” It makes the trap of sentimentality easier to avoid. While I love the paintings of Norman Cornish, for instance, I wouldn’t want to replicate them or their feeling. I wouldn’t want to characterise people in the same way. Painting the remains of an old way of life, like history, is to present a view of the past from a place in the present. Although it’s very easy to do, it’s important not to lose your historical perspective. ‘Northernness’ as constructed and remembered in the paintings of Cornish and Tom McGuinness is now an anachronism. That world now comprises only vanishing remnants. To paint like Cornish nowadays is to do little more than to produce a nostalgic commodity, historical confectionary. A painter like Alexander Millar, for example, – the bloke who does the ‘gadgies’ – seems to me to do just that. He’s draws on Andy Capp as much as on artists like Cornish, of course. But his work offers only nostalgic stereotypes and peddles urban industrial northernness as a sentimental commodity. It says little about how we encounter these places now.
Anyhow, I decided on no figures. Those people are gone now. In many ways their lives were as complicated as ours and they weren’t all the same. They were exploited and oppressed, but they also had dignity. They were wage slaves but they knew freedom too. They lived in a tiny world. But like Al’s Video shop and Owen’s bag, this world was bigger than it seems. Sometimes some of them might even have heard the Nightingale’s song. And in any case, if I’m going to paint ghosts they will look like ghosts. But ghosts, of course, are invisible and perhaps I’ve painted them already.
.
the week they pretended the world wasn’t broken
This has been the week of the G20 in London and the NATO summit in Strasbourg. It’s been a week when the leaders of the developed world have orchestrated the grand illusion that things are going to be all right. The world’s had a bad infection, it’s true, but the good news is Dr Obama’s on the case and the patient’s off the critical list. (Obama’s a bit like the political equivalent of House, it seems. A less curmudgeonly variant. What they have in common is that they both know with absolute certainty that whatever illness the economy’s got, it’s not Lupus.)
Of course the week’s been more about saving political necks than changing anything very much about the way the world works. The whole thing was a transparent media event, the straightforward massaging of electorates – or consumers, as they’re now called. A week to persuade the world to renew its faith in free market capitalism. Confidence is the new magic bullet and this week was a gun to fire it. Dr Obama’s job was to squeeze the trigger. For some reason I’m reminded of Burt Lancaster in Valdez is Coming.
Of course, in the movie of this episode in the history of world I’d have Barack played by Will Smith and Gordon by Walter Matthau. My real first choices would be Cate Blanchett for Barack and Morgan Freeman for Gordon, but I’d worry in case this alienated my audience. Casting Sarkozy would be slightly trickier either way, because in both cases I’d want to avoid having one of those films that mix computer-generated animation with footage of real actors.
On Thursday morning I had to go to a meeting in North Shields first thing. Margaret asked me if I could drop a box off for Brenda for her on my way back.
I got there at about eleven o’clock. Mrs Byro was coming out of her appointment as I arrived. She really is an extraordinarily small woman, probably no taller than Noel Edmonds. And her dress sense too is remarkable – for the rigour with which it comprehensively denies the eye all and any aesthetic satisfaction. But Mrs Byro turned out to be a surprisingly articulate woman, albeit one who speaks in a somewhat alien accent, to my ear an odd mixture of Jewish American and Low Polish, perhaps with just the hint of Belfast.
‘Hello, there,’ she said. ‘Have you come to see Brenda too? She’s marvellous, isn’t she?’
I nodded. She smiled, as if in her eyes we were now members of the same tribe, one of those human beings who cannot live without a shaman.
‘I’m worried about the deer,’ she said. ‘Do you think we’ll be all right?’
‘The deer?’ I said, wondering if perhaps I was mistaking an adjective for a noun.
‘Yes, the deer. The roe deer. I often go to stay with my sister up near the Thrunton Woods, you see. Do you know the Thrunton Woods? Well, they have a lot of deer up there, you know. Yes, and they say some of them have started to bite the necks of other deer.’
‘Really? Neck-biting deer? Do you mean affectionately?’
‘Oh no. Oh no, not like that that.’ For a moment Mrs Byro looked flustered. She seemed to blush a little.
‘So these deer attack the other deer?’ I said. ‘Why?’
Mrs Byro came a little closer. I gazed down at her, as a man in a lighthouse might gaze down at an unexpected visitor. She looked up at me, her eyes glazed like those of a bewildered rodent.
‘Bloodlust,’ she said. She swallowed deeply. ‘Bloodlust. Some of the roe deer in the Thrunton Woods have become vampires.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Vampire deer? That’s not something I’ve ever heard about before. Are you sure?’
‘Oh I’m sure,’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely sure. My sister says she’s seen it with her very own eyes. These creatures are shameless. They are breaking the laws of nature.’
I shook my head in an understanding way. The Mrs Byros of this world have a way of turning us all into doctors. I touched her shoulder. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine,’ I said, as if confirming my prognosis. ‘Most deer aren’t like that, I’m sure.’
‘That’s what Brenda said. That’s exactly what she said. She’s a marvellous woman, isn’t she? I hope she’s as much help to you as she has been to me. I really don’t know where I’d be with out her.’
Mrs Byro ambled off. She somehow reminded me of a walking proggy mat, albeit one little taller than an armadillo. I looked at Tristan and made a what the hell planet is she from gesture. He rolled his eyes and smiled.
‘She pays the bills,’ he said.
‘How are things with you?’ I said. ‘What are you doing here on a work day? Have you come clean with Brenda about having no jobs on?’
‘Yes,’ Tristan said. ‘We finally had a heart to heart. I told her I wasn’t going to pwetend any longer. I told her that if she can’t love a poor man as much as a wich man then we have no future. I’ve cleared the air. I think it’s done the twick, mate. I think we’re cool now. Fingers cwossed, eh? Anyhow, how are you, my fwiend? I hear you’ve been on holiday.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I had a week in Bowness a couple weeks ago. It was good. I went to Brantwood and a few other places I hadn’t been to and did a bit walking.’
‘Bwantwood? Oh that’s a lovely place, isn’t it? My first wife used to love to go there. She loved Wuskin. She loved all that Arts and Cwafty and Pwe-Waphaelite stuff. When the kids were little we used to take them to Coniston evewy summer and we always went to visit Wuskin’s gwave. For Claire it was a sort of annual pilgwimage. She loved those places.’
‘You’ve got kids, Tristan? I didn’t know that. Do you still see them?’
‘Yes, I’ve got two, Effie and Gabby. They’re twins. I speak to them on the phone evewy week and I go down to see them whenever I can. They’re at university now and I’m vewy pwoud of them. They’re my kids, and nothing in the world matters more to me than them. They loved Bowness too, now I think of it. They loved getting the fewwy over to the Hawkshead side. Have you ever been on that fewwy?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘In fact I was on it when I was there. I went over and walked up to Hilltop.’
‘Ah, Beatwix Potter, eh? Effie and Gabby loved Peter Wabbit and Jewemiah Puddleduck and all that stuff. We always used to take them to Hilltop so they could see the house and the pub that’s in the books.’
‘The Tower Bank Arms.’
‘Yes, that’s it. We always had a glass of cider and a packet of cwisps there.’
‘So did you ever hear about Florence Nelson?’ I said. ‘The woman who murdered a love rival on Longtail Hill.’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ Tristan replied. ‘Evewyone knows that tale. Flowence Nelson, the Steamwoller Murdwess. She was a bad un’, that one. You have to admire her determination though.’
‘Because she took driving lessons and planned it all so patiently and meticulously?’
‘No, because of the jailbweak.’
‘The jailbreak?’
‘You didn’t know that she escaped? Oh, there was no stopping Flowence Nelson. It was a bit like that film, The Shawshank Wedemption. She dug her way out of Styal pwison with a spoon. It took her over thwee years. She went on the wun. They say she dwessed as a man and hid out for months in a wuined house near Gwange Over Sands. She lived on birds’ eggs and bewwies. She knew that Ned Perfect had taken up with another woman, another wed-head. A hairdwesser fwom Twoutbeck Bwidge called Amelia Pond. They say Ned and Amelia were engaged to be mawwied. Flowence had made her mind up, they were both going to pay the ultimate pwice. They would never be wed.’
‘Florence had her sights on Ned too? I thought she adored the man!’
‘She did. She worshipped the gwound he walked on. But hell hath no fuwy and all that. From the minute Flowence bwoke out of that pwison carnage was inevitable. But first she had to find another steamwoller, which isn’t that easy for a woman on the wun disguised as a man in the Lake Distwict. Night after night she went out on a moped twying to find one and secwetly watching Ned and Amelia to discover their woutines. Eventually one moonlit August night she found what she wanted, an Aveling and Porter parked up in a roadside barn at High Bowwans. It was in perfect nick and in just the wight place. The stage was set for one of the most infamous cwimes to ever take place in those parts.’
At that point Brenda came through. She said hello to me and asked me if I’d brought a box for her from Margaret. I pointed to it on the table.
‘Oh that’s excellent,’ she said. ‘Has Margaret told you we’ve ditched the fleece and fun idea?’
‘Yeah, she told me. She told me you’ve gone back to the sunglasses idea. So what are you going to call your shop this time round, The Sunglasses Shop?’ I was aware that previously Brenda had dismissed my slightly more fanciful suggestions. I was trying to avoid being flippant.
‘Oh no,’ Brenda replied. ‘That’s far too prosaic. I’m surprised that you of all people would suggest such a thing.’
I shrugged, as if to acknowledge my stupidity. ‘Sorry, Brenda,’ I said. ‘Just a daft idea. So what are you calling it?’
‘The Maids With The Shades.’
‘The Maids With The Shades,’ I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s good,’ I said. ‘It’s memorable.’
As I drove back along through Seaton Sluice I wondered whether the old man I’d walked with through Far Sawrey wasn’t Ned Perfect after all. It sounded as if Ned too may have ended his days flattened into the tarmac somewhere along the quiet shores of Windermere. No wonder Pippa’s kids never found him in the woods. Next time I see Tristan I must remember to get him to tell me the rest of the story.
When I got home that night Margaret was resetting the time on all of her twenty three stopped clocks. She was setting them to nine minutes past nine. I asked her why she’d chosen that time.
‘Brenda advised me that it was a good time for any stopped clock in 2009.’
‘Just because of the 09 thing?’
‘No. Brenda says nine is a very special number. It is a number full of hope. It encourages and anticipates fulfilment. She says this is because it is the last single number and stands at the brink of ten. Ten represents a goal or aspiration in life.’
‘So nine minutes past nine is a special time. Yes, that makes sense. I can see that. But why not nine minutes to nine?’
‘Well, that’s something you had better ask Brenda, isn’t it?’ Margaret said, slightly dismissively. ‘I’m sure she’ll be more than happy to explain.’
‘I met one of Brenda’s, er, patients today,’ I said. ‘A diminutive tatterdemalion of a woman who has convinced herself there are Dracula deer in Thrunton Woods. Probably a suitable case for acupuncture. Or reiki, perhaps. Anyhow she told me that Brenda’s a marvellous woman.’
‘She is. She’s very clever. You’re probably the only person who doesn’t see it.’
I nodded, as if I agreed. ‘How are things with her and Tristan?’ I asked. ‘They seem better than they were.’
‘Do you think so? Well, they aren’t. Actually I don’t things are at all good there. There are quite a few things about Tristan that I think Brenda’s isn’t happy with at the minute. If he doesn’t watch himself he’s going to lose her.’
‘Her birthday’s coming up soon, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yes, the fifth of May. Four weeks on Tuesday. I’ve already got something for her.’
‘It’s not a pair of Wayfarers, is it?’
‘No.’
‘Phew!’
I went out for a walk down to the beach. I had a look at the new beach huts they’re putting up along the promenade. They have all the usual charm and authenticity of copycat retro seaside ornaments. If you didn’t recognise them from photographs you’ve seen of Whitby, Cromer, or Brighton they’d be failing to do their job. Like every other old coal town, Blyth is now more of a commodity than a community. What you see is more about branding than social need. I walked on into the dunes to Gloucester Lodge farm and then back up home through the old campsite and across South Beach Estate.
On Saturday it was dry in the afternoon. I went to my dad’s on the bike, although it turned out to be so windy that I wished I hadn’t.
On his visit to the library this week my dad had got out a locally produced book on the history of the Isabella Colliery. It’s one of those documents that doesn’t really have a clear focus and is largely a compilation of the memories of the usual community suspects, with the inevitable variations in quality. It does contain a dialect poem of sorts about Plessey Road, though. It’s entitled Plessy Waggon Way. It was written by Thomas Thirlwell and published in Blyth in 1903 in a book called Blyth and Tyneside Songs and Recitations. The piece celebrates the improvement of the road from Newsham to Blyth. Here’s the fourth verse.
The say thor’s noo commenced te run Tom Allen’s three-horse bus se gay Ne doot the Newsham foaks ‘ill cum Te Blyth each week te spend thor pay They’ll catch the fra Willow Tree Te smoke outside or smile inside Then roond bi Blyth the seets they’ll see Wye lads, they’ll get a clivvor rideIt’s a piece with more social than aesthetic value.
It was sunny today. I was going to go out the Thrunton Woods to look for wildlife, but I didn’t have much petrol in the car and didn’t feel like going to the garage. I walked from the door, up Plessey Road and then on up the bridleway into the fields which follows the course of the old wagonway. I turned off on the track over to Low Horton farm and then crossed the bridge over the Spine Road on to the Heathery Lonnen. I stopped for a minute or so and looked over to Horton Church. I wondered if I should try again to find the Nightingale’s grave. I decided not to and followed the lane north down to Bebside. I crossed the railway and went down past the crowded Asda car park. I came back over the reclaimed Isabella Colliery land. When I got home I discovered that Hugo had a new car on his drive, an orange Bond Bug. Hugo was standing, big as a pirate, hands on hips, gazing at it, when he noticed me going up my garden path.
‘Here, mate,’ he shouted. ‘What do you think of her? Isn’t she a little cracker?’
‘It’s a Bond Bug, isn’t it. Fletch? You don’t see many of those these days.’
‘Aye, that what she is. You don’t see many ‘cos there’s not many left. Me mate says there’s less than a thousand left in existence. These things are like hen’s teeth nowadays.’
‘So can you still get parts for them?’ I asked.
‘You can if you know where to look,’ Hugo replied, gnomically. He probably meant a secret scrapyard somewhere.
I went inside and told De Kooning about the Bond Bug. We went into the kitchen and I made myself a cappuccino. The two packets of onion seeds were still lying on the bench. I took my cappuccino and copy of The Observer into the conservatory. I was reluctant to open it. It’s been the week of the G20 and Jade Goody’s funeral. There’s only so much good news one man can take.
.
the skies in nature aren’t made out of paint
At teatime last Friday I noticed a pair of glass earrings and a big green bottle of Becherovka on the table in the conservatory.
‘Have you seen Brenda?’ I asked Margaret, who was in the kitchen topping and tailing parsnips.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She brought me those crystal earrings back from Prague. Aren’t they lovely?’
‘Some of the old Czech herbal paint stripper too, I see. So how are things with her and Tristran?’
‘Oh they’re fine,’ Margaret replied, in an I don’t know what all the fuss was about sort of way. ‘They’re all loved up and happy again. They had an absolutely wonderful time. They bought each other amber amulets and they’ve both vowed to wear them forevermore. Brenda bought some really beautiful lace for herself too and a wooden marionette for her consulting room.’
I nodded. ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Tristan’s okay.’
I sat down to drink my cappuccino. De Kooning came in and jumped up beside me. I’m reading a book of poetry called ‘Beasts for the Chase’ by an American poet called Monica Ferrell. A friend in New Jersey sent me the book. Ferrell wasn’t a poet I’d heard of till then. She turns out to be a bit old-fashioned and prophetic in her tone at times, quite earnest, although quite good at her craft. She strikes me as one of those poets who imagine a poet is a seer, someone with special access to a world behind and beyond this one. Such a vision (!) always entails a belief in the supernatural, often under the guise of the primal. Such poets often invoke animals as their metaphorical selves or equivalents, their spiritual alter egos and agents in the other world. Such poetry always pretends to show us what we really are, what our essence is, and to show us the eternal world our souls inhabit, the world behind the veil of perception. It’s all seductive nonsense, of course. Poetry certainly somehow plugs fairly directly into the way we make the world and the ways in which we make it make sense. But it’s an exercise done with words, just as music is an exercise done with sound and painting an exercise done with pigment, canvas and brushes. I like Tam Lin as much as the next person, but anyone who thinks that at Halloween he was turned into an adder and a bear and a burning gleed really is away with the faeries. That sort of stuff doesn’t even happen in Glasgow. Poetry and truth have a much more oblique and complex relationship than some poets imagine. We need a poetics that is rigorously non-dualist. I’m sure there must be critics out there who’ve tried to formulate something to rescue us from the mire of misty-brained mythologies. I must go on to Amazon some time and see what I can find.
‘So, De Kooning’ I said. ‘What do we make of this stuff?’
He put his front paws on to my leg and looked up at me. His right ear flicked a couple of times.
‘Yes, you’re right, we prefer Ted Hughes, don’t we?’ I said. ‘We Brits like mumbo jumbo with a bit more muscle.’
It’s been much warmer for the past few days. On Sunday it was dry and almost spring-like. I went out for a bike ride to make the most of it. I rode across to Bebside and up the Heathery Lonnen to the Three Horse Shoes. I freewheeled down the hill from High Horton Farm and over the Horton Bridge and then went up through the new housing estates towards the Nelson Industrial Estate. There was a noticeable north westerly breeze. I took the road past the Snowy Owl towards Blagdon. I glanced over at the new opencast site. It’s on the estate of those famous stewards of the landscape, the illustrious Ridleys. Matthew Ridley was a prominent figure in the development of Northern Rock and not a man to let concern or consideration for the needs or feelings of other human beings get in the way of personal profit. In fact Matt can’t get his head around the idea that anyone can actually do such a thing, because surely it’s not human nature to think of anyone but yourself. The planning application was rejected by the County Council but overturned by the government on appeal. It’s another shameful mess. I turned left at Blagdon went south past the Holiday Inn to the Seaton Burn Roundabout. The wind was finally behind me. It’s about ten miles home from there. I went via Arcot Lane, High Pit and Shankhouse.
When I got home I did a bit of gardening. I took the secateurs to last year’s withered stragglers from the catmint, lopped some branches of some of the shrubs and cut back the fuschia almost to the ground. New growth is already beginning to appear from the earth and the snowdrops are already flowering. Winter’s on its way out.
I’d finished the painting I was doing of Seaton Sluice. During the week a pack of five Loxley 16″x16″ canvases had been delivered. I decided I’d do another painting of Seaton Sluice on one of those, using the first one as my source. I underpainted the canvas in cadmium yellow and read The Observer while that dried. Then with a big flat brush I scribbled, scrawled and slapped on a sky in titanium white, burnt sienna and burnt umber. It was dramatic and swirly and turbulent and as I let myself get into it I was aware that it was very Turneresque and that it was Turner I was stealing this sky from. It was probably the influence of the burnt sienna, a colour I have only recently added to my palette, used with white on a yellow ground. I think I was somehow remembering The Fighting Temeraire – there was a print of this painting on the wall at my old school, I now recall – and The Slave Ship, I think. Turner is hard to emulate in acrylic paint though because the paint dries too quickly and doesn’t allow you to use glazes very well or to achieve those beautiful subtle gradations and colour shifts. When I’m a better painter I’m sure I’ll want to use oils a lot more. The sky I produced was of course nothing like a sky you’ll ever see in nature. I don’t think that ever bothered Turner much, and it certainly doesn’t much bother me either. After all, the skies in nature aren’t made out of paint.
On Tuesday morning I had a meeting at the Blyth office. It was another nice morning and after the meeting I decided to have a walk over to the quayside to look at the river for a few minutes before I went back to Ashington. I spotted Tristan’s white PermaPlumba van parked on the quayside close to Eddie Ferguson House. Tristan was sitting alone on one of the benches at the other side of the fence.
‘Hi, Tristan,’ I said. ‘What brings you to these parts?’
‘Just killing time, mate,’ he said. ‘Nothing better to do, I guess.’
‘Still no work, eh?’
‘Dead as a door nail, my fweind. Dead as a door nail. I’m telling you, this wecession will close Bwitain down if Bwown doesn’t sort it out soon.’
‘Do you think he can do that?’
‘No, I know he bloody well can’t. But let’s not pwetend he had nothing to do with getting us into this mess. He should pay the pwice.’
‘So how was Prague?’ I said. ‘Margaret tells me it was the business.’
‘Did she?’ Tristan said, and turned to look me in the eye, as if to see if I was joking. ‘Well, Pwague’s a fine city, sure enough, a place worth seeing.’
‘But you wouldn’t go back?’
He shrugged and gazed out over the river towards the bauxite silos on the far bank. A couple of kids were fishing on the jetty just downstream from there. The first wind turbine loomed above them. ‘Can I ask you something off the wecord?’ he said. ‘Just between me and you?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Anything you like.’
‘Have you heard of a bloke called Elvis Devlin? Wuns a bus company called Mephisto Twavel?’
‘Listen, I know about it, Tristan,’ I said. ‘Margaret told me.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I thought you might know.’
‘It’s no big thing,’ I said. ‘It’ll go no further than me.’
‘Oh no, no,’ he said. ‘That’s fine. That’s fine.’
‘I thought you and Brenda had sorted that out. I thought things were cool between you again.’
‘Bwenda’s vewy needy, you know. She’s vewy insecure. She’s got twust issues, weally big twust issues.’
‘But this isn’t about anything you’ve done, is it?’
‘The thing about Bwenda is you’ve always got to do something to pwove you love her. That’s what the Pwague twip was about. All the fuss she made about her Chwistmas pwesents. Bwenda doesn’t know what the weal thing is. If I was the wichest man in the world and gave her evewything money could buy, it wouldn’t be enough. Tomowwow she’d want something else. Bwenda thinks that if you don’t give her pwesents you don’t love her. The thing is, she’s almost got me bwoke – but I daren’t tell her. I’m wunning our welationship on my cwedit card now. The cwunch is bound to come!’ He laughed a little.
‘Now you know how Gordon feels,’ I said, laughing too, trying to keep the thing in the air. ‘So what you’re saying is that the only way to make sure Brenda doesn’t believe you’re not about to go off with some other woman is to keep on giving her things, and that if you don’t she won’t trust you anymore?’
‘Yes, exactly. You know how matewialistic she is. But it’s weally about twust, not gweed.’
‘But surely there’s no way you can give her things indefinitely? You’re not Richard Branson!’
‘No, you’re damn wight, I’m not Wichard Bwanson. I’ve told her that. I said “Bwenda this is about twust. For you pwesents are pwoof that someone loves you.” That’s why she’s attwacted to wich men, like this Elvis bloke. It’s because they can give her an endless supply of expensive pwesents. You know, that’s why I think she pwobably went for me now. Because when we met I was doing well. I was wolling in it. She’s so insecure she needs you to give, give, give. I asked her: “Bwenda,” I said, “Would you still think I loved you if I couldn’t buy you things?” “Of course I would,” she said. “What on earth do you take me for?!” But she wouldn’t, I know for sure she wouldn’t.”
‘So what’s the answer?’ I said. ‘Maybe she needs to life coach herself a bit.’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve pointed out the iwonies of this situation, believe you me I have. Maybe there is no answer. But the cwunch is going to come before long, that’s for sure. I’m spent up and there’s no work coming in. You can’t wun a welationship on cwedit. Pretty soon I’ll be bankwupt.’
‘Maybe things’ll take a turn for the better soon,’ I said. ‘Gordon’s green shoots might be springing up all around us any day now.’
‘Fat chance of that!’ Tristan said. ‘And besides that would only pwolong the agony. It wouldn’t solve the pwoblem. Bwenda needs to learn to twust. The thing is of course that it isn’t weally men she doesn’t twust – it’s herself she doesn’t twust. And evewy time she cwaves for another pwesent she knows she can’t be twusted. People who can’t be twusted don’t twust others, isn’t that twue? Because they think evewybody’s just like them. Bwenda can’t see that anyone could ever love her for what she is. It’s a self-worth thing with her. It’s as if she thinks only expensive things will ever make her good enough. But of course they never will.’
We sat quietly for a minute or two watching the river. A seal popped up and I pointed it out to Tristan. He said it had been there all morning.
‘He’s cute, isn’t he?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ Tristan said. ‘He’s really beautiful.’
‘Anyhow,’ I said, ‘I need to be making my way back to work. I hope things work out okay for you and Brenda.’
‘Thanks, mate. Me too. Oh, and by the way, do me a favour, don’t tell Margawet you’ve seen me. I don’t want it getting back to Bwenda where I spend my days.’
‘Brenda thinks you’re working?’
Tristan nodded. ‘Yeah, and I need to keep it that way. God knows what she’d do if she knew I wasn’t’
‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ I said.
I drove past Ridley Park and along Wensleydale Terrace, past the site of the demolished Wellesley School which now stands deserted waiting for the economy to turn to make it worth building houses there. I reached the South Shore estate and glanced over at the sea. At the roundabout I went up South Newsham Road. It struck me that Blyth no longer has outskirts. It has a settlement boundary which marks the point where fields will turn into housing estates. The transition is sudden, in no way gradual. You can’t really say you’re coming into Blyth these days. You’re either in or you’re out. You’ve arrived or you haven’t. I turned on the CD player and listened to The Killers’ Sam’s Town album. I played it loudly. I crossed the railway at South Newsham and cruised up the Laverock and on to the Spine Road.
I parked in the public car park at the bottom of the street. As I was walking up to the office I met Owen Vardy coming down the hill. He was wearing a loose wrinkly oatmeal-coloured linen jacket – it was at least a size too big for him – and pale baggy Chinos. He had a stripey brown and pink scarf wrapped around his neck, Dr Who style. He was leaning into every step, each of which appeared cautious and measured. Owen walks like a man on a treadmill, a treadmill he thinks might at any moment either stop completely or speed up dramatically. He was carrying an Asda ‘Bag for Life’.
‘Hi, Owen,’ I said. ‘Have you been shopping?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, not really. I’ve been to a meeting about the Collingwood children. I carry my files in this bag. It’s the perfect size, you see. Actually, between you and I, I did take a quick toddle over to the high street to pick up a few vitamins.’
‘Oh, so what vitamins do you take?’
‘Oh, you know – zinc, vitamin C, B complex, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, selenium, folic acid, echinacea, evening primrose oil, flax oil, omega-3 and omega-6, saw palmetto, feverfew, calcium, magnesium, potassium, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, garlic, CoQ10 . . . you know, just the usual stuff.’
What, no Becherovka? I thought to myself.
‘So are you ever ill, Owen?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, of course. I’m just the same as everyone else, you know, I catch colds and what have you. But there’s no point in taking unnecessary chances, is there? Oh, by the way, did you hear the latest about Jack?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so. Don’t tell me he’s been dressing up again?’
‘No, no. He’s got rid of his Skoda and bought a motorbike. A big shiny black one. I think it might be a Kawasaki. It’s a very dangerous machine, a very dangerous machine. I think he’s being very foolish, actually.’
‘It’s his life, Owen,’ I said. ‘Or death, as the case might be.’
‘Exactly. Do you know he’s the same age as me? In fact we were born on exactly the same day. You’d never catch me on a motor bike.’
‘I don’t think I’d bother trying,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t stand a chance.’
For a moment Owen missed the joke. He looked at me quizzically, his head slightly to one side, a half smile frozen on his face. What was he listening for, I wondered. Then he got it.
‘Ho ho,’ he laughed. ‘Very good. Yes, very good.’ And then he slid straight back into parson-like caution and prudence. He put his fingertips on my sleeve. He leaned in close to me.
‘And you’ll not have heard what he said to Tallulah either, have you?’ he said. ‘He offered to buy her a full set of leathers – a red leather bodysuit. He offered to take her out on his pillion.’
I laughed. ‘Oh my God, he’s shameless, isn’t he?’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ Owen said. ‘He is shameless, and lacking in any sort of dignity too, I think.’ Just for a moment I fancied I caught the elusive vinegary whiff of piety and prurience.
‘Any how,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘I really must be getting along now or I’ll miss my bus.’
Owen always travels by bus, for road safety and environmental reasons, he says, although given how much he must spend on vitamins I wonder if he could afford a car in any case. As we parted I was thinking I must read George Herbert again.
When I went into the office Mandy Potts was in reception with Apple and Sparky. She looked like she’d been crying.
‘Hi, Mandy,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’
She shook her head slowly. She wasn’t. When I went through to the team room I asked Angie what Mandy wanted.
‘She wants to go to a refuge.’
‘Again?’ I said. ‘Why? Surely Mr Zee hasn’t turned nasty?’
‘No,’ Angie said. ‘Anything but. No, it’s not that. Elephant Carmichael called to see her last night. He gave her a message. He told the Arab said not to forget that what’s his is his forever. He told her the Arab said to say hello. When they got up this morning there were four piles of sand on the step. She said they looked like four little graves. ‘
.
prague, the skylark, the mephisto express
We had more snow last week, again on Thursday. For a while it looked like it would never stop. ‘So this is how the world ends,’ I thought to myself. Most members of my team went home early. There were rumours that the Spine Road might be closed so at about half four I set off for home. It turned out that the snow was already turning to sleet and rain by then. The wild apocalyptic blizzard was a false alarm. Nevertheless it was a slushy slither back down the Laverock and along Newcastle Road into Newsham.
The snow almost interfered with Tristan and Brenda’s Valentine trip to Prague. Once or twice on Thursday the airport at Ponteland was closed for a while. But the snow is the least of their problems, it seems. Tristan had discovered earlier in the week that Brenda has become friendly with a man she’s been life-coaching. The man’s problems revolve around his marriage, it seems, and making decisions about how he is going to spend the rest of his life. He owns and runs an executive coach company called Mephisto Travel and he has a big house in Tynemouth, it seems. He’s made his fortune and he’s looking forward to taking it easy and seeing the world. What he doesn’t now know is who he wants to be with him on his travels. The man’s name is Elvis Devlin.
‘Elvis Devlin?’ I said to Margaret when she told me the tale.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That’s right. Do you know him?’
‘Do I know Elvis Devlin?’ I said. ‘Do I know Elvis?’
‘Yes, Elvis. Do you have a problem with that? It’s no sillier than your name, is it?’
‘You’re right. I just hope he’s not an impostor,’ I said. ‘I just hope he’s not a Devlin disguise.’
Margaret groaned and got on with cutting up the onions.
It seems that on a couple of occasions Brenda has been seen having coffee with Elvis Devlin at the Milkhope Centre near Blagdon. This is far enough from Whitley Bay to suggest that these encounters did not happen by chance, although that apparently is exactly how Brenda claims they did happen. (But in any case doesn’t everything happen for a reason, Brenda? I heard myself thinking.) Tristan’s suspicion is that Elvis might be singing Viva Las Vegas in her ear. So Prague nearly didn’t happen. Margaret says it’s a make or break weekend for them. She’s convinced that Tristan’s fears are unnecessary, but you know what the song says about suspicious minds.
On Friday morning the roads were okay and most people made it in. At about lunchtime I went downstairs to make myself a coffee. Lily was checking out the weather on the Met Office website. Michelle was having a sandwich and doing her sudoku book.
‘We’ve got another one,’ Lily said. ‘I’ve got another mother who’s got a spirit in her house. She says it knocks thing off the windowsills at nights and taps on the window.’
‘Has she got a cat?’ Michelle chipped in. Lily laughed.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘She hasn’t even got a broom. The place is mingin’!’
I stood in the kitchen with my hands in my pockets, gazing at the filing cabinets and waiting for the kettle to boil. I filled my cup and wandered back out into the team room. Angie came in and Lily asked her how the roads were. I sat down in Debs’ chair and put my feet on her desk.
‘You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Lily?’ I said.
‘Nah!’ she said. ‘It probably is the cat. Actually it probably isn’t. She’s probably just nuts.’
‘Oh, I believe in ghosts,’ Angie said. ‘We used to have one on the house we had in Forest Hall.’
‘So do you think Lily should call in an exorcist for her client?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘Probably for the same reason we don’t make assessments from star signs,’ I said. ‘And because it’d get me the bloody sack.’
‘What sign are you, Lil?’ Angie said. ‘Let me guess. Okay, okay, I’ve got it. You’re a Virgo. Am I right?’
‘No,’ Lily said. ‘I’m an Aries.’
‘Oh, yes, of course. How didn’t I see that? How stupid am I?’
‘I’m an Aries too,’ I said.
‘You’re not!’ Lily said. ‘You could never be an Aries.’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Honestly.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Lily said. ‘You couldn’t be.’
On Friday night I began a new painting of Seaton Sluice. I’ve painted it before. I’m ambivalent about doing it because it is making a concession to the conventionally picturesque, something I’m trying to get away from. I decided on a low horizon. I was doing a view from the bridge of Rocky Island and the Kings Head pub. I used the canvas I’d underpainted in vermillion a week or two ago. I painted the sky quickly with a big flat brush. Square chunks of white and yellow ochre clouds careering wildly around in a Prussian blue sky.
On Saturday I rode along to my dad’s on the bike. It wasn’t a bad afternoon and the paths were mostly completely clear of snow.
During the week my dad had been to the library. As I was drinking a glass of pineapple juice he gave me a photocopy he’d made of an article from The Blyth News at the end of May 1936. The article reported the death at age eighty one of Harry Clough, the father of Tom Clough, the Newsham Nightingale. “FAMOUS PIPER DEAD”, was the headline, with the by-line “Newsham Man Who Played Before Royalty”. He is said to have died at his home in Plessey Road, of which Brick Row must have been considered a part.
The article said that in 1905 Harry Clough had played for King Edward VII at Alnwick Castle. Until a few weeks before his death Harry had acted as a caller at Cowpen Coal Company, the article said. Here’s a typical paragraph from the article, which is really a eulogy:
His music like his character delighted his audience. In both cottage and palace he enchanted with the folk music of Northumberland. His nature was kind and genial without ostentation. Unassuming and without any love of fame, his art was always at the disposal of charity.
As I recall Harry was buried at Blyth Cemetary, back down on the beach road. I’d ridden past it on the way along. I wondered if I should stop off on my way back and see if I could find his grave. But no doubt I’d have no more luck looking for the grave of the Nightingale’s father than I had looking for the grave of his son.
I asked my dad which route the old road out of Newsham followed. The book on the Cloughs had said it was very rough.
‘It followed the route of Newcastle Road along to where the little roundabout is now, and it turned right there and went up towards the Laverock,’ he said. ‘Of course in those days the houses on the right weren’t there. The store field was there, where they used to turn out the ponies from the pit in summer.’
‘So was it a rough road?’ I asked.
‘It was wet. When it got over the old railway line to the relief pit it took a big sweeping bend around before going up the Laverock. It was often flooded there.’
Laverock is an old word for a skylark. Most people assume this is how the farm on the ridge got its name and that the road got its name from the farm. I’ve never seen any real evidence for this. My alternative theory is that the place name may have nothing to do with the skylark at all. In Cumbria there’s a place called Laversdale. The first element of this is from the Old English personal name Leofhere. I wonder if this name or something similar isn’t the first element in Laverock and that the second is rigg, meaning ridge. There are ridge and furrows in the field beside Laverock Hall Farm and these will date back to the medieval period at least. The farm is also on a ridge, the ridge along which the road from Seaton Delaval to Horton runs. So the history and topography are arguably there to support the possibility that this might be Leofhere’s Ridge. Furthermore, local people usually talk about going up or coming down the Laverock, as if the land form itself is the thing they are climbing or descending. They do not say they are going up to the Laverock. The word is also said with a final vowel that is very close to the i sound in rigg, although admittedly inevitably somewhat neutral. There are other examples around here of false etymologies arrived at and imposed by mapmakers, and this may be another. Rigg and rick are close enough together to allow an obvious aural mistake to be made. It was perhaps this mistake that threw an imaginary skylark into the sky above the ancient ridge.
As I rode home I glanced over to the cemetery, but rode straight by. It was getting late and the light was beginning to fail.
At about eight o’clock tonight I went out for a walk. It was a mild dry evening and there wasn’t much wind. I walked along Sixth Avenue past the front gate to the site of the Citadel. The gates were closed and the security lights were shining eerily on the colossal towering structure. It really is a hellish, oppressive monstrosity, the wrong building in the wrong place. No wonder it reminds me of Kafka’s Castle. I walked through the cut and on to Newsham Road. I walked up into Newsham and down past the first school. From there I crossed Winship Street into Elliot Street. They are already building on the site of the demolished Big Club. As I walked across I was thinking how these sites aren’t like widows: they don’t have to wait for a respectable period before they allow another building to occupy them. I had thought that apartments would be built here and I was therefore a bit surprised that building had started so soon, given the current depression in the housing market. I noticed a sign on the fence. It said “Considerate Construction”. You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? I went over for a closer look and discovered that the new building appears to be going to be a new library. I was pleasantly surprised and for a moment impressed.
I went down Elliot Street past the take-aways and the betting shop, which was still open for business. An old guy in a flat cap was leaning in the doorway telling the woman inside a story about a bet he’d made. I crossed over to the Willow Tree, which was also open, although there weren’t many in. It seems to be under new management. I noticed there were flyers on the windows for a group called The Buskers, who it seems are playing there on Friday this week. I glanced over to the Brick Row open space. I wondered what sort of music they’d be playing. I wondered if the Cloughs would all be tapping their ghostly pipers’ feet. I walked back down Plessey Road, past the old Grammar school and on under the trees beside the bus stop.
When I got home Margaret was in. She was polishing the old Napoleon from her bedroom. It wasn’t ticking.
‘How did Brenda’s trip to Prague go?’ I asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘I haven’t heard from her.’
‘But she is back, isn’t she?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, they came back yesterday, I think.’
Or maybe she didn’t, I thought to myself. Maybe she’s already riding the Mephisto Express to Vegas.
I put the kettle on and went looking for De Kooning. I wanted to put him out in the garden for a while before I did a bit more on my painting of the Sluice.
.
fugitives, ghosts, and silver polar bears
At about lunchtime on the day after baby Davina was abducted by Tania and Joe I got a call from Sergeant Godfrey Garnet at the police to say she’d been found.
‘That’s good news, Godfrey,’ I said. ‘Where is she? Is she okay?’
‘We’ve got her here,’ Godfrey replied. ‘She’s having a great time. Some of the girls are giving her a feed and oohing and aahing all over her and getting all broody.’
‘So where’s she been?’
‘We’re not sure. We got a tip off from a member of the public. We picked them up at the Spa in Bedlington Station.’
‘So was she with Tania and Joe?’
‘Aye, she was. They had some sausages and a big bag of Doritos in their basket and were trying to find the baby milk when we got there. We’ve got them both banged up at the minute. We’re trying to find out what we can charge them with. We want to see if we can do her for kidnap.’
‘So can a woman actually kidnap her own baby, Godfrey?’ I asked.
‘We’re not sure,’ Godfrey replied. ‘We’re taking advice from the CPS about that.’
‘So can we come and get her and take her back to her grandad?’ I asked.
‘Of course. Whenever you like. She’s the centre of attention here so she’ll be absolutely fine till you can get someone across.’
Michelle was out visiting someone in Seahouses. I rang her on her mobile and told her the news. She was speechless with delight and relief. I reassured her that the baby was fine. She said she’d be back down in an hour or so.
‘No hurry,’ I said. ‘The police are happy to baby sit for a while. I’ll ring grandad and give him the news. We’d better arrange to get Davina checked over by a paediatrician when you get back, just in case. The police say she’s suffered no harm, though.’
The member of the public had spotted Tania, Joe and baby Davina on the 447 Blyth to Morpeth bus. Apparently they got on somewhere in Cowpen Estate. Joe was carrying Davina in his arms. She was crying. As Tania paid the fares, Joe took his seat. He laid the wailing baby down on the seat beside him. His behaviour raised the suspicions of Polly Telfer, who as it happens works as a cleaner at the Bedlington Police Station on Schalksmuhle Road. She had been listening to Alan Robson on the night before.
Joe and Tania seemed very nervous during the bus ride, constantly looking out of the window. Polly Telfer told the police that to her they looked like “fugitives”. They got off at the Spa in Bedlington Station. Polly got off just a couple of stops or so later and immediately reported her suspicions to the duty desk. Five minutes later there were four police cars and an armed response unit at the Spa.
An hour or so Godfrey rang back.
‘Will your people be long in picking this baby up?’ he asked.
‘No, not long,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter, has the novelty worn off?’
‘Not exactly,’ Godfrey said. ‘But there is becoming a bit of an atmosphere around here now, if you get my drift.’
I laughed and reassured Godfrey that Michelle would be there any minute.
On the following Sunday I drove up to Thrunton Woods. I parked in the main car park and followed the forest road up on to Callaly Crag. There was a fair bit of snow up there, even though there was none at all down by the car park. It was a sunny day. I looked for a while over to Fawdon Hill and Hedgehope and Cheviot beyond, both white with snow. I made my way south into the glare of the winter sun, over the moor through the open areas between the conifer plantings towards the valley of the Coe Burn. I saw no-one at all during this part of the walk. The heather was high and the old tracks were very squelchy in places. At one point I had the company of a buzzard mewing above me. I saw a couple of pairs of roe deer stepping anxiously through the dead bracken at the forest edge. I left the track for a while and fought my way through the rough billowing heather towards Black Walter, where I picked up the forest road again and made my way back up into the snow before taking the track back down past the area where they are thinning the trees to the car. I walked for about two and a half hours and saw no-one other than a couple and an old guy with their dogs on my way out and a couple of mountain bikers in the car park when I got back down.
Thrunton Woods and the moors lying to the south of Long Crag down to Debdon Burn cover a large area of open land which was once part of the Armstrong estate. Some of it might still be owned by his descendents, although the adjoining Cragside estate is now owned by the National Trust, of course. What’s curious about the Thrunton Woods area is the almost total absence of traditional rights of way, along with the apparent virtual absence of old settlements. This of course cannot truly reflect the way things were before Armstrong got his hands on this land, but must represent the eviction and exclusion of ordinary people and the public from this land. It’s interesting to contrast it with the area of very similar land over at Bewick Moor, which is riddled with rights of way, many of them bridleways following old routes between old settlements. Thrunton has at some point been stripped of that traditional infrastructure of routes. It more closely resembles places like Simonside, Hulme Park and Cragside itself in these terms, probably for very much the same reasons, the loss of traditional rights under pressure from powerful and influential landowners, families and individuals pursuing their own aggrandisement and jealously defending their exclusive right to chase and kill every animal that flew, swam or ran there. Some people say Northumberland remains in some ways a feudal county. You can see what they mean. Places like this are the sites of our own version of the Highland Clearances and are haunted by a similar sense of dispossession and desolation. There’s a wild irony in the beauty and solitude we now find here and for which we love these places so much. We find freedom. We trespass with ghosts.
I drove back down the A697 as it follows the line of the Devil’s Causeway for a while before going through Longframlington and down the long hill into the Coquet valley. I listened to the album You & Me by The Walkmen. Their music has a sort of loose jauntiness, a sardonic sort of ramshackle energy. The singer declaims and laments in a suitably inconsequential and encouragingly post-modern manner. It’s well worth a listen.
When I got back I noticed that the assorted boxes of slippers that have littered the house all winter had gone.
‘Where have the all the slippers gone?’ I asked Margaret.
‘Gone to Brenda’s, every one,’ she replied. ‘We’re thinking of giving them away to a charity shop.’
‘Really? Are you winding up the Slipper Shop?’
‘Probably. The recession has pretty much killed the business.’
‘Oh, that’s sad,’ I said. ‘Still it’ll give you more time to join the Citizens in the struggle against the Citadel.’
‘Oh, that’s a lost cause, I think, don’t you? No, Brenda and I are planning a new business. We reckon that in hard economic times people spend money on things that cheer them up. Brenda reckons cinema attendance always increases during a recession.’
‘So what are you two going to do – get jobs as usherettes?’
Margaret tutted and shook her head. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.
‘You can’t be going to open a picture house, are you? Surely not.’
‘No, nothing like that,’ Margaret replied. ‘We’re going to set up a funwear shop on eBay. We’re going to call it Frills, Fleeces and Furry Things.’
I nodded. ‘Sounds good,’ I said.
I gave De Kooning a shout and picked him up. We went into the conservatory to read The Observer.
On Monday I got a phone call from an old colleague, Dr Bertrand Sticks. Sticks is a sort of computer boffin these days, although at one time he was a front line social worker. It wasn’t exactly his forte. He has a sort of other worldly detachment about him. He is also somewhat displaced in class terms, having about him the look of one of Harry Potter’s more rotund friends.
‘Hi Sticks,’ I said. ‘What you been doing with yourself? It seems like yonks since I’ve seen you.’
‘It is yonks,’ Sticks said. ‘About four and a half years of yonks.’
‘So what you doing with yourself these days? Are you still in the Stylophone Quartet?’
‘No,’ he said, for a moment appearing to lose his poise. ‘No, that folded about three years ago. I spend most of my free time these days trying to design a new kind of robot, which I hope to build eventually.’
Sticks is a man with an unnatural interest in gadgets. He is one of the broad family of those who think the world is essentially mechanical and most closely resembles a clockwork mouse. The fact that he occasionally lapses into what sounds like mysticism is somewhat confusing, of course.
‘So how will this robot be different?’ I asked.
‘It will possess emotional complexity. My robot will replicate such emotions as fear and arousal with such exactness that it will be indistinguishable from a human being.’
‘Sounds impressive. How far have you got?’
‘I’ve got some drawings. I know how it will look. It will look like a silver polar bear.’
I liked the sound of this. A silver polar bear robot with human emotions. Science can surely hardly go much further than this.
‘The reason for the appearance is that it will commemorate what I think was for me the crucial break through I made in this project. I have recently succeeded in devising a programme which responds to the image of a polar bear with exactly the same complex set of emotions as a naked man would if he were to encounter the actual beast in a natural setting, in his igloo in Greenland, for instance.’
‘Great stuff, Sticks. Sounds absolutely fascinating. But that isn’t why you rang me, is it? You don’t want me to sit around naked looking at pictures of polar bears, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. I’m looking for two or three volunteers from front line practice to help me with the development of our version of the Ernas, the Electronic Risk and Needs Assessment System. As you know there’s a big push towards computerised information recording. The next big steps beyond that are seen as on the one hand gathering the information by direct computer input from service users themselves – probably at terminals in one stop shops, maybe in booths at supermarkets – and, on the other hand, developing models which will allow the computer to analyse that information automatically and immediately issue a plan. As you know, work is also being done on ECI’s – electronic client identities – as a step towards requiring and enforcing compulsory compliance with the plans. The goals are greater efficiency and consistency, arms length risk management, and better performance in terms of meeting timescales. And of course it should free up social workers to do more interesting work.’
‘Sounds like its goal might be to do away with social workers all together,’ I said.
‘Ho ho, ever the sceptic, eh?’ Sticks said. ‘The old Luddite flame still burns as brightly as ever in you, I see.’
I laughed. ‘When people live with lunatics they become lunatics, Sticks. If the only relationships we have are with machines we will become machines. That’s what I fear, Sticks. We both know this stuff’s really all about saving money and keeping the poor in their place.’
‘Okay. So, what are you saying? Do you want to be in on this or not?’
I paused. ‘Yeah, okay,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
‘That’s the ticket!’ Sticks said. ‘Better to be one of those shaping the future than to just leave it in the hands of fools and madmen. You can’t run away from it, you know. It’s good to have you on board, my old friend.’
For a minute or two I sat looking out over the rooftops. Paul Virilio’s statement crossed my mind: The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. I began to imagine it was summer and I was walking again across the moors at Thrunton.
Sticks is coming over to see me next week to talk about multiple choice questions and risk factors. He wants to find ways to break all social work judgements and decision making into a series of binary choices. I’m looking forward to seeing him. He’s completely deranged, of course, but at least you can’t say he isn’t a laugh.
.
a fish called bwenda
On one of the days between Christmas and New Year Margaret sent me over the Brenda’s to deliver a box of sale slippers. Tristan came to the door.
‘Oh hello, mate,’ he said. ‘Mewwy Chwistmas. Are you coming in?’
‘Merry Christmas, Tristan,’ I replied. ‘Yeah, I’ve just got to deliver this box for Brenda. Is she around?’
‘She’s in with a client at the minute, but should be fwee soon.’
‘What’s she doing, a bit of post-Christmas life coaching for one of Santa’s little elves?’
‘Not quite,’ Tristan laughed. ‘But it’s not far off. She’s got Mrs Bywo in with her. This lady is about as tall as a painted teapot and dwesses like a demented wagamuffin. Bwenda knows her from her poetwy group. I tell you she has twied just about evewy thewapy Bwenda knows, for evewything fwom colour blindness to celebwityphilia. She’s come in today for some urgent acupuncture because of stwange tingles in her feet, which she thinks she got from being too close to a starfish while she was talking to the mermaids on the wocks at Cullercoats on Chwistmas Eve.’
‘I didn’t know acupuncture worked for that,’ I said.
‘Imaginawy tweatments often work well for imaginawy complaints,’ Tristan replied.
‘Hmm, good point,’ I said. ‘Any way, how are you? Did you have a good Christmas? Was Santa good to you?’
Tristan grimaced and shrugged, in the way that Trostskyists do. ‘It could have been better,’ he said.
‘Don’t tell me Santa didn’t come,’ I said.
‘Oh, I did okay that way,’ he said. ‘The usual chocolates and aftershave and what have you, and Bwenda got me an electwic scwewdwiver, which will come in vewy handy if business ever picks up again. Oh, and thanks for the socks, by the way, which I thought were weally wadical for me. No, the pwoblem is that I’ve been a bit in the doghouse with Bwenda since she opened her pwesents fwom me.’
‘Oh bloody hell, mate,’ I said. ‘You didn’t cut corners, did you?’
‘No, I shelled out an arm and a leg. But it seems I got the wong bwands for her. You know, Bwenda, she’s got expensive taste, and I thought the stuff I got her was wight up her stweet. I got her a Louis Vuitton handbag, a Cartier watch and a Burbewwy twench coat. When she unwapped them I thought she’d be cockahoop, but she wasn’t. She looked a bit down in the mouth. “Are they fakes?” she says to me. “Fakes?!” says I. “Of course they’re not fakes. You’ve no idea what that little lot cost me.” “Are you sure?” she says, looking at me thwough her hair as if I might be pulling a fast one here. “Absolutely sure,” I says. “Do you want to see the weceipts?” Eventually she came awound to accepting that they were all the weal thing, but she still wasn’t happy – because, she says, evewyone knows you can easily get fakes of these bwands. “Even Chavs wear them,” she says. “Yes,” I says, “but yours aren’t fakes, are they? Not like theirs.” “Yes, but how will anyone know that?” she says. “They don’t look any diffewent.” I tell you mate at that point I was wishing I had bought bloody knock-offs and saved myself a lot of money. “So what do you want me to do, Bwenda?” I says. “Pin a These Are Not Fakes label on them to tell the world they’re weal?!”‘
‘It’s a strange world we live in, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Someone wearing a fake imagines the world thinks it’s the real thing, and someone wearing the real thing imagines the world thinks it’s a fake! Maybe we should all go back to going around naked, eh?”
‘Anyhow,’ Tristan went on, ‘she eventually came awound, but not before I said I’d make it up to her by taking her for a short bweak in Pwague for Valentine’s Day. Not that I can afford it, of course. Work’s all but dwied up. You can’t get moved for bloody plumbers now that house building’s stopped.’
At that point I heard the door of Brenda’s consulting room open. Mrs Byro came out and shuffled down the hall to the front door. I could see what Tristan meant. At first glance Mrs Byro appears to be to haute couture what Hugo is to horticultural design and you’d assume that her wardrobe must be a junkyard, a random accretion of disparate garments. She is no bigger than a hobbit and has long hippy dippy hair of a curiously neutral colour. She struck me as the kind of woman you’d imagine must always choose her outfit for the day before she puts the light on. She has that sort of ostensibly accidental charity shop eclecticism that you never actually see among the poor (who are for the most part running around in fake Levi’s carrying fake Louis Vuitton handbags, of course). But I suspect it would be a mistake to think that the Mrs Byros and the Brendas of this world are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their wardrobe strategies. They are in fact sisters.
‘Hi, Brenda,’ I said. ‘Merry Christmas.’
‘And a very merry Christmas to you too,’ she replied, giving me a big hug and a kiss on each cheek. ‘Did Tristan tell you about Prague? Oh, I’m so excited!’
‘Yes, he did,’ I said. ‘It sounds fab. Hey, and thanks for the Christmas present. It’s really interesting and, er, you know, unusual.’
‘Yes, I thought you might like it,’ she said. ‘I thought it would look good on your desk at work.’
‘Hey, I’d never thought of that. Yeah, I see what you mean, though. It’d be really good to be able to just turn it on whenever things become a bit too stressful. I must remember to get some batteries for it on my way home.’
I gave Brenda the box of sale slippers and drove back up the coast, listening to Lucinda William’s latest album. She’s made better, but it’s good. It hardly matters what she sings though, her blistered paint and rusty broken nails voice says it all.
When I got back Margaret was peeling some carrots. I asked her what Brenda had got her for Christmas. ‘Did she get you a fountain too,’ I asked.
‘No,’ Margaret replied. ‘She got me a Strength Rune silver necklace, a collection of Nam Champa soaps, a Green Man candle holder and some candles. Oh, and a black beret. It’s all very good quality stuff, of course.’
‘Yes, it all sounds very Brenda to me,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t sound especially you. When did you last wear a beret?’
Margaret continued peeling carrots. She said nothing. I picked up The Guardian and wandered through to the conservatory. De Kooning joined me.
‘If you had a friend who was a goldfish,’ I said, ‘and she had bought you a Christmas present, what would you have liked her to have got you?’
De Kooning looked up at me for a moment. He licked his paw and began to clean his face.
‘Okay’ I said, ‘if the choice was between a wrecked pirate ship aquarium ornament and a catnip-filled fluffy toy mouse, which one would you go for?’
De Kooning stopped cleaning himself for a moment and looked at me as if I was daft.
‘Okay, okay, it’s a no-brainer, you’re right. Unless the goldfish was called Brenda. If Brenda was your goldfish friend you would have got the pirate ship.’
Sunday was bright and frosty. I drove up to Lordenshaw. I walked over to Spylaw and from there contoured across the moors around the southern slopes of Simonside before climbing up to the crag on the path that passes Croppy’s Hole. There was a fair amount of ice here and there and the peat on top was frozen rock solid. But it was dry and sunny and it was easy walking over the top on the newly laid stone slabs. To the north there was snow on Cheviot and Hedgehope Hill, shining like a bride in the winter sun. It was a beautiful day. It was 2009. As I walked east off Dove Crag I began to think about Basil Bunting.
When I got home Hugo was on his drive. He was working on the Alligator with what appeared to be an angle grinder. He gave me a wave as I went up my path. I went out into the back garden and looked over the fence into Hugo’s garden, which I hadn’t seen for a while. It was much the same as before, except that there was a straggle of silvery tinsel on the moose’s antlers. The waterfall was turned off and the pond was frozen. The ducks and the otter were in there usual places. The grey heron gazed at the ice and never blinked, not even once. It was late afternoon. The last rays of the sun were glinting on the still naked girders of the Citadel.
.
kurt schwitters and the empty box of fate
I spent last week staying in a cottage at Under Loughrigg close to Ambleside. I usually have a week away walking in the hills in December, and last week was an especially good time to go this year as it meant I escaped the mayhem of Margaret and Brenda trying to post off all those slippers in time for Christmas. But last week wasn’t such a good week weather-wise. It rained almost every day and on a couple of days rained very hard. Some nights I could hear the Rothay running high and rushing by below my bedroom window.
Monday wasn’t a bad day. There was still quite a good covering of snow on the mountains. In the morning I left town by the old coffin road going north towards Grasmere. As I made my way up the hill toward Rydal Hall fugitive glimpses of sunlight were catching the snow high up on Fairfield, my destination. As I often do when walking where he lived, I tried to put myself in Wordsworth’s shoes and to imagine how walking this path must have felt to him. I often convince myself that this is a futile exercise: even my footwear and map militate against it. Wordsworth had a relationship with the weather and the place that I can hardly begin to imagine, I suspect.
It was cold on Fairfield and felt damp. I made my way down the snowy descent to Grisedale Tarn, which lay below me like a slab of grey pewter in its bowl of broken rock and white snow. From the tarn I followed the bridleway back down to Grasmere. I wandered around the village and had a cappuccino before making my way back by way of the paths to the south of Grasmere and Rydal Water. It turned out to be the best day of the week. After a frosty start on Tuesday the rain began.
Each morning I opened the curtains and looked out to see rain on Wansfell. Last Christmas I had a cottage over that way, not far below Jenkins Crag, close to where Kurt Schwitters lived when he first came to stay in Ambleside in 1945. The weather was better last year and I spent several good days up on Wansfell looking for Schwitters’ footprints and walking the paths he must have so often walked in the last years of his life.
Because it was raining much of the time last week I found myself spending more time than usual in the cottage. Sometimes I’d sketch, sometimes I’d read or listen to music. Sometimes I even watched daytime television. I saw programmes I’d heard people talk about but never seen before.
Late one rainy afternoon I sat watching the dusk closing in, descending like a dark amorphous cloak over Wansfell. I turned on the television and Deal or No Deal appeared, hosted by Noel Edmonds. Edmonds has bleached blond hair, oiled and slicked back, and a scraggy goatee beard. He reminded me of Richard Branson, who also has this cheesy swashbuckler look about him. I initially simultaneously recalled both Amundsen and the Aryan Nation. Putting those echoes aside, I noticed how much of the Barnum and Bailey Ringmeister Edmonds had about him. A small, middle-aged man, perhaps no taller than a vacuum cleaner, he was clad in seasonal browns and russets, perhaps with a little gold or scarlet trimming here and there. He was wearing a high shouldered sort of jacket with a collar of a different colour to the body. It may have been velvet and for all I could see may have had a fitted waist and tails. I think he was wearing a waistcoat and he was in a collar and tie. His look seemed to encode a sort of amiable if vaguely counterfeit authority and expertise. He reminded me of a medicine man of some sort, the sort of quack doctor who at one time in America travelled from town to town in a caravan selling hair restoring potions, wonder cures for warts, patented tonics, snake oils for every occasion, that sort of thing. Dr Swapshop, perhaps, or Dr Houseparty.
It’s easy to dismiss a programme like this as cynical, manipulative poppycock just because that’s what it happens to be. But maybe this programme actually shows us a lot about how we construct, imagine and deal with risk in our society. It appears to set desire and dream against reason, but the hero(ine) of the show is always the (relatively poor and needy) contestant, and we are quickly persuaded – as are the studio audience – to identify with the contestant’s wishes and fears and to believe in the dream. The Dream of course is the usual fairy tale that if you want something enough you will get it. The hapless viewer is sucked into a regressive world of magical thinking. We join the contestant and the audience in believing that wishing can alter the way things are. The scrupulous – and inscrutable – sealed boxes seem to suggest that as no-one can tamper with them a rational decision can be made knowing there can be no cheating. But the inscrutability of the boxes means that until they are opened they could potentially contain any amount of money, and magical thinking leads us to think that we have the power to change that amount – or rather that whatever amount is in there will be the direct consequence of our fears and wishes. The boxes are the property of providence and contain nothing until the future reveals them. It’s another version our old esse est percipi conundrum. The future is empty. It will only be filled by events that have yet to happen.
The other player in this game is the banker, whose money it is that we are to suppose the contestant is playing for. From time to time this inevitably somewhat metaphysical banker intervenes by telephone via the dapper little Dr Swap to make the contestant an offer for the box in front of him or her, the box that contains the amount of money the contestant will win if he or she chooses to go that far. The banker’s interventions are supposed to be cold, rational and driven by a calculation of self interest. But within the context of the game of course they are as dubious and manipulative as any other element. Our mistrust of bankers comes into play: how do we know this banker doesn’t know what’s in the box all the time? The banker’s offer can never be taken at face value, even if he (let’s assume he’s male!) appears to merely respond to the fortunes of the contestant. If he offers a large sum to someone who’s on a winning streak it might mean that he actually knows there’s a bigger sum in the box and he is trying to prevent the contestant winning it. The offer can therefore be seen as evidence that the contestant is indeed in for a big win; the offer should be rejected. On the other hand a small offer to a contestant on a losing streak might look like an attempt to make them think they’re bound to lose when the banker actually knows all along that there’s a lot of money in that final box. So this offer too, which in rational terms may also represent as much as the contestant is ever likely to win, is rejected. Similar self-deceptions occur if we assume the banker doesn’t know what’s in the box. A good offer in this case encourages the contestant and his or her audience to see this as evidence of the efficacy of magical thinking. It says the banker too knows that wishing hard enough really does change the future. A bad offer has a similar effect, because it too can be read as the banker attempting to discourage dreaming or encourage fear because he knows the power they have. In this world of fortune and fate every sign must let you believe that you can be a winner too.
Of course in this game the truism that the future has not yet happened and therefore no-one can know what it holds is entirely illusory. The inscrutable boxes that contain the future cannot be changed. Not unless you believe that wishes and fears do determine the future. If you believe this a swan will hatch from the duck’s egg that was irrevocably laid in the contestant’s box, or, if your fears are too strong and you don’t wish hard enough, your immutable treasure will dwindle to a trifle.
As the thick saturated mass of night fell on Wansfell that afternoon a young woman with a toothy smile had a run of good fortune: by chance she opened four boxes in a row that had only low amounts in them, thus increasing the probability – and belief – that her box contained one of the large sums. The banker responded by offering her £10,000. On a balance of probability basis this was more than the contestant was likely to win: most of the remaining boxes contained less than that, even though one did contain £250,000. But faced with the go for it, girl dream that drives these things, reason went to the wall. Encouraged by her boyfriend and the rest of the audience the young woman chose to open more boxes. She lost three of the remaining four large amounts in quick succession. The banker made another offer: £1,200. Again on a balance of probability calculation this was a reasonable offer, but as there was still a one in eight chance that she might win £35,000, she pressed on. She eventually opened the box in front of her and won £5. The offers the banker made were never enough to coax her out of her belief in the power of wishing, and that’s probably the only real calculation our make believe banker ever made. At the end the young woman with the toothy smile said sorry to her boyfriend for failing. Perhaps she felt that she hadn’t wished hard enough or that she had feared failure too much, although I imagine she later rationalised it all as a failure to make a rational choice based on probability when it became advantageous to do so. ‘I should have just taken the ten thousand, shouldn’t I?’ she’ll say.
The next contestant that afternoon was Gordon Brown. Gordon, like the young woman with the toothy smile, began well enough and had some early success in eliminating a better than chance number of low amount boxes. The telephone rang: the banker was offering Gordon £20 for his box. Little Dr Swap, standing on some books to enable him to see over the table top, rolled his eyes. Gordon smirked knowingly. He’s a man who knows all about bankers: when they act like this you can be sure they’re up to something, and that something is probably feathering their own nests.
‘I, er, owe it to the nation to honour our manifesto promise on this, er, issue. I am able to announce today that in respect of the, er, Honourable Gentleman’s offer our position is this: er, no deal,’ he said. He laid his hands on his inscrutable future, as if it was the dispatch box at question time. He had about him a smug certainty. If there was ever a man to defeat the banker, Gordon was that man. The audience cheered. Gordon winked at his wife Sarah, who was sitting in the front row of the audience with one of their children on her knee.
Gordon next opened box number seven, the one in the possession of The Man in a Cowboy Hat.
‘I’m prayin’ for you, pardner,’ The Man said.
‘Go for it, Gordon,’ someone from the audience called out.
The box was opened. It contained only £1.
The audience cheered. Gordon smiled bashfully, and turned to look at Sarah. He was visibly chuffed. He went over and shook The Cowboy’s hand, as if to thank him for his act of exceptional good will. The Cowboy smiled, as if he was a hero too. ‘I guess my prayers were answered,’ he said.
The phone rang. The banker upped his offer to £2,000. Gordon smirked again. He looked like a man who thought he had already all but vanquished the possibility of defeat.
‘It is my, er, responsibility to manage the nations asset prudently. Through prudence and good management this government has established the healthiest set of unopened boxes in a generation. I am confident that we can withstand any, er, minor, er, mis, er, fortunes. We are therefore in a position to say again to the Honourable Gentleman: no deal, sir.’
The audience loved it. St Gordon could do no wrong. But then, just as it had with the young woman with the toothy smile, fortune took a turn for the worst. In what seemed like no time at all Gordon was reduced to only four unopened boxes. Three of these boxes contained amounts of £15 or less; the fourth contained £250,000. The telephone rang. Standing as tall and proud as a pepper mill Dr Swap lifted the handset slowly to his ear. He nodded and then nodded again.
‘He’s now offering you . . . ‘ Dr Swap paused and took a deep breath. For a moment he reminded me of a miniature Kirk Douglas. ‘£15,000. Deal or no deal?’
Gordon smirked and smiled knowingly.
‘No deal,’ Gordon said, without hesitation. Here was man who felt the hand of history on his shoulder. ‘I have not come here today to make a deal. I have come to restore pride to our nation. I have come in the can do spirit that has always characterised our nation. I can win the £250,000. I will win the £250,000. Anything less will be failure.’
The audience went bananas. The tension in the room was electric. Sarah had her hand over mouth.
‘Which box do you want to open next?’ Dr Swap asked.
Gordon looked at the three remaining choices. He chose to open box number nineteen, the box belonging to The Swiss Cheese Girl.
‘Good luck, Gordon,’ she said. ‘Vee all vont you to vin.’
The Swiss Cheese Girl opened box nineteen. The audience gasped and the studio fell into a dreadful silence: the £250,000 was lost.
Gordon hung his head. He suddenly looked ten years older. The phone didn’t ring. Gordon opened another box and the £15 was now also gone. There were now only two boxes remaining: £10 and 10p, and one of them was definitely his.
The telephone rang. Little Dr Swap listened attentively.
‘Oh, that was nasty,’ he said. With an expression that resembled a bewildered chicken he turned to Gordon. ‘He’s offering £7.50. Deal or no deal?’
Gordon looked back over his shoulder. Sarah was sitting with Alistair Darling. They both smiled half-heartedly, shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders. Gordon looked down at his unopened box. Surely all hope was now gone. But Gordon was not a man about to smile bravely at the cruel hand fate had dealt him. No, Sirree.
‘I have an offer to make the Honourable Gentleman,’ Gordon said.
‘You have?! That’s new!’ Dr Swap said, suddenly as upright and tall as a meerkat standing on its hind legs.
‘I want to ask the Honourable Banker to allow me to put half a million pounds into each of the two remaining boxes,’ Gordon said. ‘Deal or no deal?’
The audience gasped; the audience murmured.
‘Well, I never!’ Dr Swap exclaimed. He put Gordon’s offer to the banker.
‘He says it’s highly irregular. But he is prepared to consider it. But first he wants to know what happens to money in the box you don’t open,’ Dr Swap asked.
‘That money will be his,’ Gordon said. ‘I only get to keep my, er, winnings from the box I open, in accordance with the, er, rules of the game.’
The offer was put to the banker. The banker’s reply came back immediately.
‘He says it’s a deal!’ the dapper one said, with a gnome-like gleam on his face. He carefully placed the phone back into its cradle.
The audience clapped, stamped, whooped and cheered. Sarah and Alistair gazed at Gordon in what looked like a mixture of amazement and adoration. Little Dr Swap was again looking around the audience in much the same way as a meerkat might look across a desert. He was in new territory too. Gordon nodded to Alistair, who made a quick mobile phone call and confirmed that the money was now in the boxes. The game could go on.
‘Well,’ Dr Swap said. ‘I think I know what you’re going to do now.’
Gordon was just about to answer when the phone rang again. Our Little Swashbuckler assumed an expression of frozen disbelief. He slowly picked up the receiver. You could have heard a pin drop in the audience.
‘Okay. Yes, I see. Okay, I’ll put that to him.’ Dr Swap turned to Gordon and paused. ‘He wants to make you a final offer.’
Gordon smiled, almost smirked again. Self-satisfaction was returning to his face. He was truly back in the game.
‘The banker wants to offer you the amount you would have won originally had you been left with only the highest value box. He is offering you . . . £250,000. Deal or no deal?’
The audience emitted yet another collective gasp. This was a game like no other. The banker had never before offered that kind of money to anyone. Gordon nodded and again smirked just a little. He looked over his shoulder. Alistair and Sarah were nodding enthusiastically. They had manic grins all over their faces.
‘It has always been our hope to bring success to this country,’ Gordon said. ‘To act in the interests of all of the people, not just some of them. We have not achieved what we have by taking unnecessary risks or behaving in a reckless way. By following a policy of sound financial management we have become the envy of the world and restored this nation’s stature in the world. Now is no time to abandon the successful course we have set. Tell the banker I will accept his offer. Tell him he has a deal!’
The audience cheered enthusiastically. Sarah and Alistair sprang from their seats and ran across to Gordon and embraced him. Little Dr Swap shook his head and smiled. He sidled over and shook Gordon’s hand.
‘That was quite amazing, Gordon,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever see a game like that again. Against all the odds you achieved your goal – you won the £250,000. Gordon, you are a winner!’
Later that evening the rain eased off. I walked into town and went to Zefferelli’s to eat. It’s always a very good place to go and for me the most comfortable and pleasant place to eat in Ambleside. I ordered garlic bread followed by vegetable chilli and rice. As I waited for my food I listened to the conversation the two couples on the table next to me were having. They were obviously well-educated and well off. I think one of them perhaps lectured at a university, perhaps in politics or sociology. He also seemed to speak fluent Italian and at times demonstrated this a little too loudly.
They were debating Gordon’s performance that afternoon. Three of the four took the view that it would increase his poll ratings significantly. The lecturer bloke wondered if a snap election early next year wasn’t now a possibility. The other man felt the Conservatives should be given a chance. The lecturer argued that both major parties would follow very similar policies and that winning an election at present would be a bit of a poisoned chalice. Things could only get worse.
After I’d eaten I wandered around Ambleside for a while. There were a few Christmas lights dangling above the street and strung across shop windows and their reflections shimmered darkly on the wet pavements. It looked very seasonal. As I walked I remembered that Schwitters is said to have sometimes gone to the cinema that now also houses Zefferelli’s restaurant. I began to wonder what films he might have seen there. I like to think he would have gone to see It’s a Wonderful Life and perhaps also The Big Sleep with Bogart and Bacall. I like both of those films and decided that when I got back I would see if I could get DVD’s of them both.
On Friday it rained very heavily. In the morning I wanted to visit Schwitters’ grave but it was chucking it down. I sat drinking a cappuccino and watched the Jeremy Kyle Show instead. Kyle appears to be the ratfaced scourge of the Chav Nation, television’s self-appointed grand inquisitor of the underclass, who appear to submit themselves to abuse and humiliation as if it is in some way their version of living the dream. If you worship the Great God Celebrity it seems to matter little how you get yourself to its altar. Kyle would never get away with talking the way he does to any other group in society, of course. The powerlessness of his victims is a key element in his show, although perhaps one we only become aware of if and when we reflect critically on the power Kyle himself appears to exercise, the way he mistreats his guests with impunity. Would he talk to Andrew Sach’s granddaughter like that, or Kate and Gerry McCann? Kyle’s programme is one of those that seems to enable the middle classes to feel superior but which in reality is fascinating and reassuring because it acts out the secret nightmare of their own lives, the dark shadows of what they really are. Kyle’s programme revolves around sexual intrigue and betrayal, infidelity, promiscuity, paternity and disordered family life. He deploys the DNA test and lie detector test with much the same cavalier brutality that a witchhunter might have deployed thumbscrews or the ducking stool. I think the grotesque enjoyment we might get from watching this programme is superficially sadistic, but ultimately secretly deeply masochistic. We may be the witchhunter, but we are always also the witch. On Friday Gordon Brown was on the programme. Remind me to tell you about that some time. It was really quite revealing.
Early on Friday evening the road south to Windermere and the road north to Keswick were both flooded for a while. The Rothay was running high behind the cottage and once or twice I went out with a torch to check that it wasn’t about to burst its banks. By midnight the level was beginning to fall again. I went to bed and listened to its rush. In the morning I left early. I needed to talk to De Kooning about the empty box of fate. I was hoping all the slippers had gone.
.
the broken troubadour
I am walking in a perfect place. I am with Brenda, who I take to be my guide.
‘Where am I?’ I ask. ‘What is this place?’
All around us and across our path soft snow is gently falling. Across the meadow there is wide expanse of grey water, a lake. The dim shapes of mountains rise up beyond it. It is twilight. Candles are flickering in the windows of the little stone cottages we pass from time to time.
Brenda is dressed in what I later come to believe is a Munchkin outfit. On her head she is wearing a big soft deep red pancake hat. It reminds me of the hat Rembrandt wears in his late self-portraits, especially the one of 1660. It is vague and amorphous, unnecessarily substantial. Snowflakes sit on it like butterflies on velvet. Her dark hair tumbles out of it like a frozen black waterfall.
‘Why aren’t we leaving any footprints?’ I ask, as I glance back over my shoulder down the path we have walked.
‘The paths in heaven leave no trace of those that walk on them,’ Brenda replies.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask.
‘Heaven knows,’ she replies.
As we approach another cottage I hear the strumming of a gypsy guitar. Brenda leads me to the little window. Inside I see Jack Verdi. He is dressed like an Elizabethan courtier, in a bottle green jerkin, a white ruff and a tall silk hat. He is wearing French hose.
‘It’s Sir Philip Sidney,’ I whisper. He is sitting on a low stool, playing to Tallulah, who is dressed in a black t-shirt and black skinny leg jeans and has her red hair tied up in bunches.
‘He is The Broken Troubadour,’ Brenda says.
Tallulah begins to tap random rhythms on a tambourine and to dance to the music of the guitar. Her dance is wild, precarious and full of flamboyant contortions.
‘She is a drunken giraffe,’ Brenda says. I watch the show, mesmerised.
‘Why do human beings leave no footprints when they walk across the snows of heaven?’ I ask.
‘Because heaven can never change,’ Brenda replies.
Inside the cottage Tallulah is now spoon feeding her troubadour a large bowl of warm English apple pie and hot vanilla custard.
‘How did they get here?’ I ask.
‘They had the right tickets,’ Brenda replies.
‘What are the right tickets?’ I ask.
‘Grace and kindness and laughing eyes.’ she answers.
‘Grace and kindness and laughing eyes?’ I say. ‘Is that how I got here too?’
‘No,’ Brenda replies. ‘You stole your ticket from someone you once knew.’
I opened my eyes. It was almost morning. De Kooning was softly tapping my nose with his paw.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said. ‘Have the clocks all started ticking again?’
.
tallulah and the good catastrophe
It looks like Debs will be off sick for a few months. Earlier this week I held an emergency meeting with the whole team to talk about redistributing her cases.
‘How do you want to do this?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to decide who gets what or should I just throw all the names into a hat and let you take turns picking one? Or do you want to discuss them one by one and see who’s interested?’
They decided that I should decide. I divided the couple of dozen most serious cases on Debs’ caseload between the five workers left standing. Angie copped for Mandy Potts, who as it happened turned up just as the meeting ended. She had Apple and Sparky with her. Mr Zee wasn’t with her. Mandy was upset.
‘Seems like a good time to introduce yourself,’ I said to Angie.
‘Oh, isn’t her weird boyfriend with her?’ Angie said. ‘I was looking forward to meeting him. I like young men in uniforms.’
‘A Zorro outfit’s hardly a uniform, Ange,’ Lily said.
‘Isn’t it?’ Angie pulled her pondering face, and wandered off to meet Mandy and the kids.
‘What’s up?’ Lily asked, when Angie came back along.
‘They’re going to make Mr Zee get a job. The dole’s on his back. Mandy doesn’t want him to because she’s scared that if she’s on her own Flinty will come to her door.’
‘She has a point,’ Lily said. ‘But it’s not a point the dole will take.’
‘No, they won’t,’ Angie said. ‘He’s down there now and he thinks they’re going to send him for an interview.’
‘He should go,’ Lily said. ‘No-one’s going to give a job to a man dressed as Zorro, are they?’
‘Well, that’s the other thing,’ Angie said. ‘Mr Zee isn’t prepared to not dress the way he does. He thinks he has a human right to do so, like Christians wearing crucifixes and Muslims wearing the veil.’
‘Another good point,’ Lily said. ‘But again, not one the dole will buy.’
‘No, they won’t,’ Angie said. ‘They’ve suggested he may need to take work at MacDonald’s.’
‘Oh my God,’ Michelle said. ‘Can you image that, Zorro appearing in the drive-thru window! Imagine asking Zorro for a couple of Happy Meals and a regular Coke!’
‘It could bring them business!’ Lily said, chuckling to herself as she tried to get on with inputting stuff on to the computer. ‘It’s a shame MacDonald’s aren’t likely to think the same.’
‘Mandy thinks that Mr Zee will leave her and return to Newcastle if they force him to take a job where he can’t continue to dress the way he does.’
‘That surprises me,’ Lily said. ‘I always had the impression from Debs that he’s really committed to Mandy and the kids. Things will fall apart if he does leave, that’s a certainty. Mandy will never cope without him.’
‘Bloody men!’ Angie said. ‘Is there a single one out there that isn’t a complete waste of space?!’
It snowed on Thursday. I sat in the team room for a while first thing going through the post and listening to the team talking about the BBC documentary on the Shannon Matthews case which had been on the previous night. Fairy tale explanations are the bedrock of the world according to the popular media, and on this occasion the police seem especially ready to give the story the right slant by stating that this girl’s mother was ‘pure evil’. Here we have The Cruel Mother. ‘I thought that police officer was about the tell us the story of Hansel and Gretel or something,’ I heard Angie say. The police are hardly more self-aware or enlightening as social narrators than The Sun or The Daily Mail. It is within the terms of the crude and narrow narratives the popular media constructs that the identities and aspirations of their audience will to a significant extent arise. Karen Matthews, who no doubt is a person who came to see herself in the terms of those narratives, was and is stupid, dysfunctional, misguided, and inadequate. But this description could equally as well be applied to the police themselves who had four hundred officers in the area for almost a month and failed to find a child who all the time was under their very noses. The same could also be said for the troops of journalists who traipsed around the area 24 hours a day for the same period. And now they’re blaming social workers for not seeing this coming two years earlier. Lily wondered when we would get our crystal balls.
‘It’s a pity Shannon didn’t think of dropping pieces of bread as a trail to her wicked uncle’s house, isn’t it?’ Angie said. ‘That’s always the thing to look for in a case like this.’
I went upstairs. About mid morning I was sitting up in my office looking out over the car park watching the white stuff falling hypnotically, like a weird quiet currency being repaid to the world. Nature has a fascinating economy. A pale blue Favorit slithered into the car park. It was Jack Verdi. He got out and pulled the collar of his black reefer jacket up around his face. He was wearing his Ray-Bans. His long grey hair was tied back in a pony tail by what looked like a red elastic band. In his pale desert boots he gingerly made his way across the snow into the office. He brought to mind something vaguely Russian, maybe someone from a Gogol story. He’d come for a meeting with Debs and forgotten she was off. He asked if I was free and came upstairs for a chat.
‘Hi, Jack,’ I said when he came into my room. ‘How’s tricks?’ He shook my hand. As he leant forward to do so I briefly caught sight of his pale blue eyes peering out over his sunglasses.
‘Hey, I’m not so bad, mate. Bloody awful weather though.’
I looked out of the window and nodded.
‘Actually I like the snow,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ Jack said, ‘to look at, but not to drive in!’
I made him a cup of tea and for a while we talked about music, as we always do. He always asks me who I’m listening to as a preamble to him telling me what I might want to try instead. On this occasion I swapped him Teddy Thompson and Josh Ritter for a classic album from Jefferson Airplane and Neil Young’s Live at Canterbury House 1968, Sugar Mountain album.
‘Hey, that was quite a performance you gave at Rosie’s leaving do,’ I said, finally mentioning the elephant in the room. ‘Man, you certainly blew them away that night!’
Jack shook his head and looked down into his lap. ‘Yeah, well, maybe. I just wish I’d stuck to bloody well playing the piano, as I was supposed to do.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ I said. ‘Banging out Chas and Dave numbers in a room so thick with the reek of HRT isn’t exactly my bag either.’
He laughed. But he had something more on his mind, and I thought I knew what it was.
‘Hey, Jack,’ I said, ‘I’d just let it go if I were you. Most people will already have forgotten about it, you know how they are. You’re the only person who’s thinking about now.’
‘Oh yeah, yeah, I know that,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not that, it’s what it’s telling me about me that bothers me. I’m becoming desperate. I can’t seem to let myself ever be anything but young. You know why I did that? Because I’m scared to death of getting old. I’ve seen this happen to other guys, guys who I was once in bands with. I’m starting to do what they’ve done and make a bloody fool of myself.’
‘Well, as they say, if you recognise a problem you’re half way there to solving it.’
‘Yeah, but how do you solve the problems of decrepitude and death?’
I laughed. I wanted this conversation to remain light. ‘Euthanasia’s good,’ I said. ‘I’ve already booked myself a one-way ticket to Switzerland.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ Jack said, shaking his head.
‘You don’t want to go to Switzerland, Jack? Compact land-locked mid European country? Bankers, watchmakers, Toblerone, Heidi, St Moritz, lots of big snowy mountains? It’s the sort of place where there’s never any litter and they don’t ever have to think about Asbo’s. Switzerland’s not such a bad place, Jack.’
‘I don’t mean I don’t want to go to Switzerland, man. No, I mean I don’t want a die. At least not yet. I’ve still got some good times left in me. The problem really is that the rest of the world is starting to disregard me. It’s as if as you get older there’s a quiet conspiracy to exclude you from things. It starts when you’re about thirty. The world begins to tell you that you can’t do that. And do you know why it says that? It says it because it embarrasses them if you do. They just don’t want you around. They discard you, like you’re an old-fashioned appliance of some sort. I don’t buy it, mate. There’s some stuff I’m just not ready to say goodbye to.’
‘Like good old rock and roll, eh?’
‘Well, yeah, but not just that.’ His Aviators looked straight at me and for a moment or two he paused. ‘You read poetry, right?’ he said.
I said I did sometimes, yes.
‘You know I’m into Keats, don’t you? Yeah? Okay, can I show you something? It’s like a modern take on something he wrote. I’d be interested to know what your response to it is.’
He bent over and unbuckled his brown leather satchel bag. He took out a couple of sheets of A4 and handed them to me
‘You’ll know the original,’ he said. ‘It’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’
I.
O what’s bothering you now, my bonny lad, Alone and palely loitering? Has thy assessment slithered into the sink?Are you waiting for the telephone to ring?
II. O what can ail thee, fostering man!
So flushed and so woe-begone?
The question from the Chair was crass,
The Police Checks were never done.
III. I see a cloud across thy face
Your reviews are all long over due,
And in thy diary a fading date
When your anxious manager last hounded you.
IV. I met a damsel in the tearoom,
Full beautiful-an Ashington child,
Her hair was red, her foot was light,
And her laughter was quite wild.
V. I bought a cosy for her napper
And sent her a text from my mobile phone;
She texted me back and asked me to sing
‘Will you give this little dog a bone.’
VI. I sat her in my Skoda’s front seat
And put Crosby, Stills and Nash on,
I whizzed her around the slippery bends
Till all her lingering doubts were gone.
VII. She bought me bags of morish sweets,
And Honey Tunes and herbal tea,
And then in an accent strange she said-
“Bonny lad, aa’ve got the hots for ye.”
VIII. She took me to her terraced grotto,
And swept the sawdust from her floor,
And I gazed into her wild wild eyes
Until my heart could take no more.
IX.
And with a tambourine she lulled me asleep,
And I dreamt I heard a terrible din
‘Twas the scariest dream I ever did dream,
I dreamt I was trapped inside her bin.
X.
I saw pale ploughmen, businessmen too, Old heartthrobs, death-pale as if without feelings; They cried-“The Bonny Lass Without Pity Has dumped us amang her peelings!”XI.
I saw their starved lips in the garbage With horrid warnings gaping wide, And I awoke and found me dumped, With another old scratter at my side.XII.
And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering, My assessments all soggy in the sink, And my mobile phone not ringing.
After I’d finished reading it I said nothing for maybe a minute or so. Nor did Jack.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘This is, er, interesting.’
Jack looked at me. He wanted more than just, er, interesting.
‘Hey, Jack,’ I said. ‘What do you want me to say here? How I’d feel if I was the woman you wrote this for?’
‘It shows, then?’
‘Yeah, Jack, it shows. It’s about Tallulah, right?’
He nodded slowly.
‘So,’ I said, tentatively, ‘have you and her got a thing going on, or what?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s just tittle tattle. Emma Pope started that rumour as a put down to me.’
‘But you would like to have something going on with her, yeah?’
He nodded, safe behind his sunglasses. ‘Yeah.’
‘And? . . .And? . . . And what? You think she’s too young for you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all. What bothers me is that she’ll think I’m too old for her.’
‘She’s not a kid, Jack. She must be well into her thirties now. What are you saying, that she’s shallow?’
‘No, she’s definitely not shallow,’ Jack said, almost indignantly. ‘She’s a woman with deceptive subtlety and depth. She’s like a great river and her complexion is forever changing as she makes her course through her days. Sometimes she’s wild and tempestuous, sometimes she trickles and gurgles, but sometimes she’s quiet and still and just so damned profound. No, she’s not shallow, man, but I’ve got twenty years on her, and she knows it.’
I nodded. I almost smiled. I looked at the poem again.
‘This dustbin metaphor,’ I said. ‘That’s serious, right, a deep concern hidden behind a daft joke?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Exactly. What bothers me is that even if I got something off the ground with Tallulah she’d pretty soon dump me for a younger model. She has a bit of a reputation for chewing guys up and spitting them out.’
‘And the bin, that’s the bin of decrepitude, yeah? It’s a bin you fear that once she dumps you in you’ll be in for the rest of your days?’
‘It’s more than that,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a bin I fear I’m already in. Not because I want to be there or because I’m really need to be. It’s just the bin the rest of the world has put me in. It ‘s like that Yeats line, isn’t it, the one about old age being tied to you like a tin can to a dog’s tail. It stinks, man!’
‘And the bonny lass without pity, that’s not just Tallulah, is it? She’s society too, isn’t she, and young mistress Time herself. This bonny lass is The Reaper.’ A picture of Tallulah Hudspith wielding a giant scythe crossed my mind. It was an image from a Tarot card.
‘Yeah, something like that, I guess,’ Jack said.
‘You know what I’d do if I were you, Jack? I’d go for it. What’s the worst that can happen – you don’t get the gig. Or if you do you don’t get booked for a second night. But hey, Jack, for you this might just be the gig to end all gigs. One night with Tallulah might be your Madison Square Garden moment, the one gig you’ll never forget!’
Jack stood up. He very deliberately buttoned up his black reefer jacket. He smiled quietly and flicked his pony tail back over his collar. It was indeed a red elastic band holding it together.
‘Carpe diem, eh, man? I kinda knew that would be your take on it. Thanks, man. It helped.’
Jack picked up his brown satchel and slung it over his shoulder. ‘Hey, and one more thing, eh? This conversation we’ve had, strictly between me and you, right?’
‘Yeah, of course, Jack,’ I said. ‘Between me, you and the gatepost.’
He smiled and shook my hand again. I walked along the landing with him. As he was making his way down the stairs he turned and asked me if I knew Warren Zevon’s stuff.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He’s good.’
‘He wrote a song called I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,’ Jack said. ‘Give it a listen some time.’
‘I will’ I said. ‘But isn’t poor old Warren now fast asleep himself?’
‘He is, man. But what a way to hit the mattress, eh?!’
I laughed. Jack left. The snow had turned to rain.
When I got home I had a quick pizza and then put my boots on to go for a walk. It was turning cold and the slushy snow was beginning to freeze into crusty waves. I walked along Broadway and then on as far as the Thoroton Hotel. I went up Marlow Street and cut through past the sports centre and over on to Newsham Road. I walked up into Newsham and down Winship Street past the site of the Big Club, which is still fenced off but now completely razed. At the roundabout I stood for a moment or two and looked at the strings of Christmas lights slung above the road. I then made my way back down Plessey Road. In the last few days a lot more Christmas lights have appeared on houses and a lot more Christmas trees in their windows, but Christmas still seems slightly reluctant to appear this year, even though the Angel Alistair and the Good St Gordon from every television in the land sing, ‘Spend, Spend, Spend!’
‘Spend what?!’ the world sings back.
When I got back home Brenda was there again, gathering more slippers into boxes to take away for dispatch.
‘Hi, Brenda,’ I said. ‘How’s business?’
‘Brisk!’ she replied. ‘Surprisingly so. Things have really picked up in the past few days.’
‘Well, you can never go far wrong with slippers at Christmas, can you?’
‘Yes, I think you’re right. Folks may not have much money this year, but everyone can afford a good old fashioned pair of slippers, can’t they?’
Brenda didn’t have her Auguries of Innocence cardie on that day. She had a sort of long very expensive looking camel-coloured wrap around coat. She was also wearing green knee high leather boots with big shiny silver buckles on them, and out of the collar of her coat the leafy frills of a spring green blouse of some sort erupted. She also wore a coffee-coloured knitted hat of some kind, a one with a peak and a small chocolate brown button on the crown, the sort of hat that reminds me vaguely of Barbra Streisand. For a moment it crossed my mind that Brenda looked rather like a tortilla wrap.
‘So what’s Tristan getting you for Christmas?’ I asked.
‘Oh I don’t know that!’ she replied. ‘That would take all the fun out of it. I like surprises.’
‘But there must be something you hope he gets you.’
‘Oh well, yes, of course. What I’m hoping for is a Matthew Williams Chapelle weave coat and some Jimmy Choo Erica ankle boots, as well as some lovely smellies and maybe some nice stocking fillers, such as earrings and brooches and choccies and things. Just lots of lovely lovely delicious surprises really. I’ve pointed Tristan in the direction of net-a-porter.com and I know for certain that he’s looked. I’m quite excited really. But what about you? What do you want for Christmas?’
I paused for a moment, as if taking thought. ‘The emancipation of the working class, I think,’ I said, very calmly and seriously. ‘Yes, that definitely. That and world peace.’
Brenda nodded her head approvingly. ‘That’s just such a beautiful wish,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course, you’re absolutely right. It is the spiritual aspect of Christmas that really matters, not all the shopping and materialism. And in any case it really is better to give than to receive. You know, I don’t really care what anyone gets me actually. Christmas is just such a special time of year. Just be close to someone you care about and to know they’re there, that’s all any of us really needs.’
So I’ll tell Tristan to just send you a note and prod you from time to time then, I thought. I know what great joy and cheer that will bring.
‘So what are you getting Tristan?’ I asked.
‘An electric screwdriver set.’ Brenda replied. ‘I saw one at B & Q. It was such a good buy and it will be all he’ll ever need. He’s always saying how much he wished he had one.’
‘That’s nice, Brenda,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got to spend then a practical gift is always the way to go, I think.’
Lucky Tristan, I thought. But of course I’m sure Brenda will get a huge amount of pleasure from giving Tristan his electric screwdriver set.
‘Oh, but what do presents matter?’ Brenda said. ‘Christmas really is first and foremost a spiritual time, a time to think of others. As you said, a time for peace and love. Material things are such a terrible distraction sometimes, aren’t they?’
For a moment I wanted to ask her what the word ‘spiritual’ meant. But I thought better of it. In any case I think I already know how spiritual Brenda is: she’s about as spiritual as a checkout till. She has exactly the sort of spirituality the Angel Alistair wishes we all had this year.
‘Do you know anything about the Tarot, Brenda?’ I said, changing the subject. It was like asking a seagull if it knew about fish heads.
‘Yes, of course,’ she replied, becoming animated. ‘Do you want me to do a reading for you?’
‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘But thank you for the offer. No, I was wondering about one of the cards and what it means.’
‘Which one?’ Brenda said, always ready to share her esoteric knowledge with the curious.
‘The one with the reaper on’ I said. ‘Is it called the Tallulah?’
‘The Tallulah?’ Brenda said, screwing up her face. ‘The Tallulah? The Tallulah’s not a Tarot card. No, no. No, the card you’re describing is the Death card.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘The Death card. So there’s not an expression which is like “turning the Tallulah” or something like that?’
‘No,’ Brenda said, a little sharply. ‘No, there isn’t. The reaper is on the Death card.’
‘And if that card turned up for you it would be bad news, right?’
‘No, not necessarily,’ Brenda said. ‘That’s a common misconception. The Death card does not necessarily signify death. But it does signify that major change will occur in your life. Catastrophic change, in fact, but not necessarily for the worse.’
So, I thought to myself, turning the Tallulah foretells catastrophe. But not necessarily a bad catastrophe. The idea of a good catastrophe appealed to me. This was an idea it would be good for Jack to know about.
‘So have you ever done a reading for anyone when the Death card has turned up?’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Brenda replied. ‘Many times.’
‘And are any of those people still alive?’ I asked.
‘Yes, so far as I know, they all are.’
‘But they will have all encountered a catastrophe by now, yes?’
Brenda had rumbled my game a while ago of course. She was prepared to play along no longer.
‘You should stop taking the mick,’ she said. ‘You know, many people have been helped to make important decisions in their lives through the Tarot. Just because you think it’s nonsense, doesn’t mean it is nonsense, you know.’
I nodded. She was right of course. I began to wonder about making a catastrophic decision, or rather, making a decision to have a catastrophe in your life. It seemed to me that since the future can’t really be foretold, this must be the way the Tarot works. The cards suggest that decisions of a certain kind should be made. It sets an agenda in someone’s mind. Decisions are then made according to the cards’ suggestions and hey presto – the cards appear to have done what cards never can and to have foretold the future. The classic self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps most divination works in exactly the same way. The effect is that you take active responsibility for your own future but that by some sleight of hand you can always say that whatever happens was bound to be, that it was written in the cards.
I wandered through to the conservatory. De Kooning was sitting on the windowsill, looking out into the dark where the snow had fallen among the gaping spaces of the Citadel. Sometimes I think I’m too passive about the future. It’s not something I get a hold of and try to make for myself. Maybe it’s that working class thing. Maybe it’s something else. I just seem to be happy to sit and watch the river flow by. I could dip my foot in, I know that. Maybe I fear a catastrophe if I do. Maybe I think I might turn the Tallulah if I get my feet wet.
I wondered if I should get a Tarot pack and do a reading for De Kooning. I know of course that this sort of stuff doesn’t work for cats. Cats sit on life’s windowsill and sing Que Sera Sera. They sing it nine times over.
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a queer sort of petrified sphinx
I finally watched I’m Not There. Todd Haynes’ method was immediately clear to me. I was quite amused when the Richard Gere Dylan – a man who seemed to be looking for the part of an ordinary man in an extraordinary world – wandered into the town of Riddle on Halloween. Here we have the familiar conceit of the world as a riddle, perhaps in a modernist incarnation. Riddles have an answer, have a sense and a meaning even if they are elusive. Nietzsche’s ‘World Riddle’ came to mind, the Welträtsel, and Pope’s poem ‘The Riddle of the World’. The riddle is second cousin to the jigsaw and the scheme in cosmological terms. Dylan Gere is a clear contrast to Dylan Blanchett , the one who just a year or two earlier had looked out on the world as an apocalyptic junkyard.
While Dylan Gere is wandering pensively around this place of Riddle, the narrator says something like ‘nobody’s who they seem to be’. Ha ha, I thought. He should have been in Glasgow on that night!
I suppose that the question watching the film threw up for me was whether Dylan was just an ordinary man in an extraordinary world or whether he was an extraordinary man in an ordinary world. (For the sake of completeness the other possibilities are an ordinary man in an ordinary world or an extraordinary man in an extraordinary world). The modern world itself of course never settles long enough to be called ordinary, so we might say that extraordinariness is the normal condition of existence in a society like ours. Extraordinary is the ordinary condition of late modernity. And the sixties were an extraordinary time. America at war with itself, a tortured nation, a nation disintegrating. Assassinations, napalm, the space race, the arms race, the cold war, television, rock and roll, paranoia. These were apocalyptic times. But isn’t modernity in any case pretty much the normalisation of apocalypse?
The film presents the self as a fragmented, vulnerable and contested reality. If we accept this premise then perhaps we should recognise that as a person Dylan was both ordinary and extraordinary, and that this was perhaps key to his difficulties. And yet it is the idea that Dylan was arguably Everyman in the film that interests me most, the notion that in reality Dylan is much the same as you or I and that (increasingly?) our situations are becoming like his. Nowadays we all have to deal with shifting personae and shifting expectations. And with the lure of celebrity. We can no longer be satisfied with ordinary lives and in our world of greedy media an extraordinary life will make you famous; we are somehow fooled into thinking the corollary of this is that to be famous will make your life extraordinary and transform you into an extraordinary person. It won’t. But to be a celebrity is an almost normal goal now. The opportunities are many, from Big Brother to The Weakest Link. And yet how will being a celebrity even for a day change us? We will expect a transformation, a sudden coming into real being. And yet the opposite is likely to happen. The half-hearted realities of ordinariness will vanish from out hand; we will suddenly become no-one at all.
Of course Dylan’s burden as a celebrity was exceptional. But perhaps only different in scale, not in nature. We all want to ‘live the dream’. Haynes’ tale from this perspective is a cautionary one: the dream is only a dream and once you see that you will collapse into yourself. Anomie and dissociation will follow. You may want to refuse them. You will not be able to.
Haynes has his Dylans speak lines from various Dylan sources – sleeve notes, poems, Tarantula, interviews and so on. At one point one of them says a poem is a naked person. It’s interesting Dylan didn’t say self: a self and a person are not the same thing. A person is an outward reality, a social and political entity. The self is a supposed inner entity, a psychological item. People will say Dylan is a complex person. Did anyone ever suggest he had a complex self? The self is something we imagine we see when gaze into ourselves (ha ha – did you notice the tautology here?!) The self is like a soul. Like an essence. We imagine each self as having a unique simplicity. Can we imagine a person without a self? This seems almost like asking if we can imagine a person without a body.
Bob Dylan is a complex person and it is this complexity that Haynes film seems to want to unravel. And yet ironically I think the film falls into the trap of trying to show us Dylan’s soul, even though it takes its primary text from the song which says ‘I’m not there’. Maybe it needs to do this for dramatic reasons, since where would a western narrative be with a protagonist too elusive or transient for the audience to identify with? There is no narrative to chaos, and without a narrative there may be no space for a me. Maybe there is something to be said for the idea of the self as a centre of gravity for the narrative of a life. Maybe the self is a necessary fiction, the unavoidable consequence of giving chaos an order. I accept chaos, Dylan Blanchett says, but I don’t know if chaos accepts me.
In Haynes’ narrative we are presented with a succession of selves we are to suppose Dylan to have had. We like to imagine the self as an onion, and think perhaps some people have more layers than others. Dylan’s layers are peeled away, one after another. I think the film is structured so that the reflective persona of Dylan Gere perhaps represents Dylan’s curious soul, the simplicity that he finally is. Dylan Gere appears almost as if he’s the father of the others, the one from whom the seed of all the others came.
Maybe this is a stretch, but does it make sense? Was Dylan more than one person – one self – at any one time? Dylan’s selves were successive rather than simultaneous. One didn’t lie beneath the other; one lay next to the other, succeeded it. Each self was performed and the performances were repeated until they were succeeded by a different performance – a different self. Haynes is right to give these selves different names; the extent to which they can be said to be the same self is problematic. Dylan’s life is a succession of selves, none of which has any privileged or higher reality. His life, like all our lives, is a life caught between becoming and having been. The self is not there, only the performance that is what we are. Dylan Gere appears to perhaps be the real Dylan, the inner man, a meta-self, a self beyond performance. But even this is an illusion.
Dylan breathed in the chaos that is America and breathed out shapes that made sense, the shapes of a new America, brave new versions of traditional identities, hanging in the air, fragile and flickering, as vulnerable as ghosts in a hurricane, like projections on the screen of the nation. Dylan performed a succession of American selves. Or perhaps a succession of American personae. In the end Bob Dylan found he could not escape from Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan was never really there at all. He sang America and America sang him. A song is anything that can walk alone, he said. A song falls short of selfhood. A song is not even a person, it seems. A song might be no more than a ghost.
The thing that I wonder about is whether Dylan in this film is Everyman. But the thing I remember about the film is the music, the way the songs seep from the scenes and haunt the images. The songs ambush you, taunt you, lure you into places you had forgotten about. The songs unsettle you and reassure you, sooth you and pierce you, empower you and terrify you. They do all these things at once. This is a film for Dylan freaks by a Dylan freak. In the end this is what the choice of songs says to me. These are legendary, hallowed songs, the songs from which the myth of Bob Dylan is woven.
I’m a bit worried about Tom Ridley. Tom is the admin manager for the area and works between three sites. I met him at the photocopier today. It’s a Xerox Workstation M35 model, a freestanding square box that’s about the size of chest freezer, or in animal terms, a small horse. Tom was talking quietly to it, promising it a ‘special treat’ if it was a ‘good boy’ and behaved itself for him.
‘Hi, Tom’ I said. ‘How you doing?’
‘Yes, fine,’ he replied. ‘Just trying to encourage Frodo to be a good boy for me.’
‘Frodo?’ I said. ‘The photocopier’s called Frodo?’
”Yes,’ Tom replied. ‘If he’s good all day I’ve promised him that I’ll take him out this afternoon.’
‘Out, eh? Anywhere special?’
‘The beach. He just loves the beach. Of course I’ve got to keep him on his lead in case he runs into the waves and gets washed out to sea. He’s still just a puppy really and very excitable.’
Tom leaned on Frodo’s stout ivory plastic frame as he spoke about him. I was wondering which end was which.
‘Of course the other thing about the beach,’ he went on, ‘ is that he gets to meet other photocopiers. That’s good for him because he needs to learn how to socialise with them and not to be aggressive or snappy.’
‘Yeah, that’s a good point,’ I said. I asked him if Frodo was almost finished his current job and could I perhaps copy a couple of reports.
‘Of course,’ Tom said. ‘You’re such a good boy, aren’t you? Now be nice for the man and copy his things carefully for him, do you hear?’
Tom patted his ivory friend affectionately on the shoulder, picked up his wad of documents and set off down the corridor towards his office.
About mid afternoon I went down to the photocopier to copy some documents. The photocopier was gone. I abandoned the idea and decided I’d go home early. I decided to drive down through Sleekburn and along through Cambois. I’d seen a television news item about E-on’s proposal to build a new coal fired power station there on the site of the old one and that local people were protesting about it. Quite understandably so too, because the government isn’t insisting that only so-called ‘clean’ coal fired power stations can be built. But did we really expect them to? Next thing you know the local MP’s will be telling us how this will be good for jobs, our own brave Socialist warrior foremost among them, no doubt.
It was dusk on the beach. As I drove south listening to Dengue Fever I saw a figure close to the shoreline making his way north. It was Tom. He was pulling along the Xerox M35 by a leash, like a man dragging a mule. Frodo seemed to me to be a rather more reluctant walker than Tom made him out to be. I was somehow reminded of Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot. For a moment I fancied I saw two small photocopiers run up to Frodo and sniff at him. Frodo set himself back on his haunches and his hackles went up. Tom is right, Frodo isn’t yet well socialised. I drove over the crossing and up through East Sleekburn, past the site of the old power station and Wilson Avenue. It was dark and there wasn’t a soul around. I wondered if I shouldn’t email Tom’s manager about his behaviour, but I decided it was really none of my business so long as he returned Frodo by morning and wiped the sand from his wheels before taking him back into the office. It’s certainly odd for a grown man to adopt a Xerox M35 as a pet and take him for walks on the beach, but it isn’t something which is very likely to harm children, at least not as long as Frodo is properly muzzled when they are around him.
When I got home that night Brenda was there. She had come to collect some more slippers to send out. She was wearing a knitted garment of many colours, a long wrap-around cardigan of sorts. It had multi-coloured words of some sort embroidered all over it.
‘Hi, Brenda,’ I said. ‘Nice cardie.’
‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said. ‘It’s handmade. We bought it from a textile artist in Hawick a couple of weeks ago. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a doozy,’ I said. ‘What do the words say?’
‘You mean to say you don’t recognise them?!’ she said. She turned around to let me read her back. Entangled in meandering lines were phrases I struggled at first to recognise and disentangle. And then one of them became clear to me: a robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage.
‘The Auguries of Innocence?’ I said. ‘Your cardie’s got lines from Blake embroidered all over it?’
‘Yes,’ Brenda said, swinging back around. ‘Isn’t it fab?! Tristan bought it for me on a day out. I just had to have it. I’m going to wear it when I go to my next poetry weekend. What do you think? I think they’ll just adore me in this!’
I tried to read Blake’s entangled utterances as they crept and crawled and snaked and snaggled over her shoulders and down her arms and across her torso and around her hips. If the sun and moon should doubt in mustard yellow criss-crossed by the poison of the snake and newt in dull maroon. In emerald green, the beggar’s dog and widow’s cat giving birth to the long divergent slate blue arc of the wanton boy that kills the fly.
‘I think it’s fantastic, Brenda,’ I said. ‘Does she also do the Proverbs of Hell?’
‘Yes, she does. Oh, that one’s really beautiful too. Oh, did Margaret tell you about her horoscope, by the way?’
‘Not really,’ I said, remembering how last night I’d noticed Orion again for the first time this winter. ‘What star sign are you again, Brenda?’ I asked.
‘Taurus, of course,’ she replied. ‘Loving, loyal, prosperous and patient, the creative type. Doesn’t it show?’
‘It shows in your cardie,’ I said.
‘What sign are you, again?’
‘I believe I was born under the sign of hammer and sickle,’ I said.
De Kooning wandered in. I picked him up.
‘Have you got your stock of sunglasses in yet?’ I asked.
‘No, not yet. Why? Are you after a pair.’
‘Yeah, I was thinking about getting a friend a pair of Ray-Bans for Christmas.’
‘Aviators?’
‘No, Wayfarers.’
‘I’ll see if I can get you some, if you like.’
‘Thanks, Brenda. Yes, that would be great.’
Margaret came through from the kitchen. She’d put on a big pan of onions to boil. I went through and put a pizza in the oven for tea. I gave De Kooning some prawns and sat in front of the television to watch the news. Later I went upstairs and rummaged among my books to find something William James wrote about the notion that the world might be a riddle to which there is a single answer.
All the great single-word answers to the world’s riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!
After I’d eaten I went out in the dark and walked through the town. Christmas is coming. The streets were remarkably quiet. I caught sight of my reflection in Woolworth’s window and for a moment thought it was a stranger. I was thinking about Nietzsche and Descartes and the Wizard of Oz.
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yammering 