Posts Tagged ‘larkin’
the scaffold in the field
It rained this morning for the first time in a while. The world was soft and grey.
Mandy, Mr Zee and the kids were in reception when I arrived. Mr Zee was in his full brown as peat regalia – mask too – and standing in his characteristic legs astride, taller than a tree posture. He was holding Sparky’s hand. You have to admire any man who finds the time to take this much care over his appearance in the morning.
‘Debs is on holiday,’ I said. They knew. The duty worker was seeing to them. They were still having benefits problems. Sparky was wafting a new plastic sword around and looked happier than he has for a while.
Michelle was on duty and she was on the telephone to the benefits agency when I went through. They were being their usual helpful selves. Michelle was getting nowhere fast and they weren’t offering any suggestions as to how Apple and Sparky might be fed today. It wasn’t their fault, they said. It’s the system. They can’t do anything about it. The tax credits needed sorting. Mandy was up to her limit on social fund loans. They couldn’t give her a crisis loan. They’d try to get it sorted by the end of the week. The usual script.
‘So should we suggest they become beggars instead – or buskers maybe?!’ Michelle put the phone down and looked at me as if she was gobsmacked. ‘Or should I say Mr Zee should just go and do a bit burglary – he’s got the mask for it?!’
She shook her head in dismay. It’s always like this, she was saying. I laughed.
‘Oh, it’d be beneath the dignity of a man of Mr Zee’s standing to be involved in the felonious acquisition of someone else’s property,’ I said. ‘And besides, he’d stand out a mile at the identity parade. Give them twenty quid and tell them to come back at the end of the week if their benefits still aren’t sorted.’
Income support benefits are meagre and inadequate, and the whole system seems designed to be as difficult as it can be. The poor are still out there, even if they’ve have been rendered largely invisible by governments who want to pretend they don’t exist and who turn the visible few into miscreants and fiends, the kind of people who mug old ladies, drag tiny toddlers into the bushes in the park, spray paint obscenities across the walls of public toilets, set pit bull terriers on meter readers. The kind of people who would steal a broken blue swing. Yobs, junkies, psychos, perverts, scroungers and paedophiles . . . The tabloids remind us of the cast every day. The fairy tale tells us that the poor are basically a bad lot because if they weren’t they’d have money in the first place. Or possibly because Gordon has turned them that way. Which ever way you throw it though, the undeserving poor are now the only poor there can possibly be, and Mandy, Apple, Sparky and Mr Zee must therefore be numbered among them.
Michelle gave Mandy the cash and she, Mr Zee and the two children set off in the direction of Netto’s. Shortly afterwards Lily came in chuckling, having just encountered Mr Zee for the first time as he was leaving the office.
‘He’s not for real, is he?’ she asked, rhetorically.
‘I’m afraid he is,’ Michelle replied, ‘which is more than you can say for the benefits agency. Put the kettle on, Lily. Let me make you a brew.’
I had to go to Morpeth this afternoon. The rain had stopped and a warm haze floated among the hedgerows and trees as I drove back by Plessey Woods and over Hartford Bridge. When I got home Margaret was standing on the pavement outside of Geraldine’s house. She and Geraldine were having an animated discussion about the Citadel. I pulled into the drive and looked up at the red girders glaring down at me through the mist. Hugo was in his castle bolting spiked black railings to the top of his garden wall.
‘Here, you all right, mate?’ he shouted over.
‘Yeah, not so bad, Fletch. You’ve got yourself a few fortifications, I see.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, not bad, are they?’
For tea I had carrot and coriander soup and a few thick slices of olive bread. Margaret was still talking to Geraldine. I sat in the conservatory drinking a capuccino. I asked De Kooning if he’d like me to read something by Larkin to him. He jumped up and sat down beside me. We didn’t bother with the Larkin. We just gazed together at the scaffold in the field beyond the house.
an attempt to do without a sky
Yesterday was Whit Monday. Or at least it used to be. The Day of the Holy Spirit, the day after Whitsun, now best known to some of us because it reminds us of a poem by Philip Larkin. It’s the spring holiday, a big day in the Retail Park calendar. I’m not sure that many people choose to marry at this time of the year now.
It was sunny and dry, although there was quite a strong north easterly wind. It felt cold. I went out walking, down along the harbour and up the river to Kitty Brewster and through Bebside. I made my way back by the Plessey wagonway track. The usual shirt-sleeved gaggle of chirpy locals was standing outside smoking at door of the Willow Tree.
When I got home I went out into the back garden and cut back the laurel. Big fat flower buds have suddenly appeared on the flag irises, one of my very favourite flowers. The French lavender is beginning to flower too and the lilies are stretching a little higher each day. Golden yellow buds are swelling all over the climbing rose and the tight little reddened nodules of the honeysuckle tell me the garden will soon be full of its swooning scent. Summer is all but here now.
I went back into the conservatory. Margaret was reading. A pair of fluffy maroon mules sat on the coffee table beside her. I should have bought the chicken wire when I had the chance. I went through to the living room and put on the Decemberists and stared for a while at the painting of Rowhope I’ve been working on since I was sick a couple of months ago. I’ve slowly taken a lot of the yellow out of it, yellow being in my mind the most sickly colour. The painting is unusual for me in that it has no sky. My paintings depend upon their skies most of the time. The painting of Rowhope is an attempt to do without a sky. I also want it to look as much like a map as a representation of the scene, although not more so. That’s tricky, I found. The painting has some good angles and pleasing lines and it’s certainly a lot less nauseating than it was. Perhaps it’s time I let it go.
In the early evening Hugo and Mrs Hugo came home. He unloaded some spiked railings from his van. A little while later I heard him drilling the walls outside. He was installing CCTV. The loss of the swing has obviously made him more insecure than I’d first imagined. Hugo’s world is being fortified. Sometimes you can’t help thinking that even a little affluence is dangerous in a world where needs are constructed by spending. When money is burning a hole in your pocket it’s easy to imagine there are dragons in the world that only shopping will slay. Before too long I imagine Hugo will have battlements and a drawbridge – just as soon as Argos get their stocks in. And why not? He can afford them, the Daily Mail says he needs them, and they will make his property thoroughly modern and highly desirable even in a difficult housing market. This is the future. Electric fences, gun turrets, guard dogs, searchlights and sirens, laser trip wires, beartraps among the lupins, landmines among the gladioli. This will be the ordinary life of the ordinary aspirational man.
When I came in tonight I glanced up at Hugo’s cameras. He has two and they seem to be positioned to ensure they cover not only his whole front garden but the footpath in the street too. In fact I would guess that he has wide angle lenses and that our garden path also appears on his monitors. I wanted to give him a nervous little wave. I wondered if under the Data Protection legislation I had the right to ask him for copies of any video recordings of me. It’s a little disconcerting to think that Hugo will know all my comings and goings. He’ll know if I’m on foot. He’ll know if I’m carrying my old umbrella. He’ll know if I’m wearing a red woolly hat. But I guess this is a price worth paying if it ensures that never again is a broken blue swing purloined by a kid in a polyester suitlet.
The Crane Wife is a fine album, at times quite overwhelming.
yammering 